Cabin Fever Ghost Town - Thread - Urban Exploration Resource

Man do you run out of idioms for the words shack, home, and cabin quickly. Anyways, this was a trip from last summer, signifying the final set from 2021 and the eventual posting of a YIR (for which I'm always late).

This was the most isolated location I've ever been; somewhere around a nine hour drive from front range Colorado nearly down to the New Mexico and Utah borders. After a series of winding roads up and down hill after hill, the town popped up 45 minutes after the road turned to dirt, but not before a massive Superfund plant that will probably be cleaning the site for the rest of my life. The ghost town was once a thriving place that bustled with mines, machinery, thousands of workers, and up to 14 bars in its heyday. Unfortunately, today it's the most polluted site in Colorado, a fact made extremely evident by the bright orange status of the tailings pond in front of the superfund plant. All I can say it that it looked like melted road cones. When it was active, the mining company was sure to neglect repairing the lining of their tailing ponds, updating their equiptment, and, of course, informing anyone when these actions created massive cyanide leaks (cyanide being the chemical used to extract gold from ore). I can't recall with certainty, but I believe the company had as many as three major cynaide leaks, which they not only failed to report but continued working through until the disaster repeated enough to gain attention in the nineties. Can you imagine?

I enjoyed the luxury of walking over the creek that flowed directly from the site of a that industrial accident, again with orange water, which I looked down at from a log hoisted over it as I contemplated the super powers or lukemia I'd get from falling in. The trek over the water was necessary to see the old boarding house, the box shaped building atop a great hill in isolation from the others. The surrounding cabins comprise what's considered to be the best preserved ghost town in the state (although some thirty or more buildings have been removed from its original status). I'm uncertain where this judgement comes from, given the fact that many of the buildings have fallen into matchsticks and I've seen other ghost towns that are at least more structurally intact despite their vandalism (I'm looking at you, Rook). The area is preserved for future historical restoration and signs around the premises remind you to look all you want but not enter. I was fine with this given the lack of photography subjects within any of them (minus the boarding house, which I only entered up to the deathrap floor). The town is further garded by the superfund workers who frequent the area, lollygaggers, and loud drunken men riding four wheelers (Colorado's version of rednecks).

What I found to be most interesting was the fact that there was so much broken glass from antique bottles that you couldn't lie down or go barefoot anywhere in town. The grass blades seemed to break out from between glass shards and in some areas there were literally piles of broken shards from alcohol bottles, all evidence of the heavy drinking that passed the time for the isolated miners in the middle of bumfuck. Strange as it may sound, and beautiful as the buildings and history are, it's the broken bottles that really stand out to me from this trip.

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