Today Chelsea and I went on another adventuring trek. This time we brought her friend Carlee and my friend Caleb along. We started out early in the day so we would have plenty of time unlike last time.
We started out at the north end of the Utah Lake and drove south along the highway on the west side of the water because the first item on our list was to see what was directly on the other side of the lake. Even though I have lived in the valley my whole life, I’ve never been to the other side of the lake and the curiosity was killing me. We learned that there isn’t much to see. Actually, there isn’t much there period. It was fun to see Saratoga Springs though.
The next item on our to-see list was the ghost town of Dividend, UT. Dividend is an old mining town nestled up in the hills along a small, winding highway. The only people we encountered there were men employed by a drilling company who were there to work; they didn’t bother us though and we were free to explore. We were able to explore a few cement building remnants and some other remains of civilization. There was quite a bit to see.
After Dividend, we continued along the highway up into the hills. We encountered quite a few dirt roads that looked promising to explore but with the higher altitude, we also ran across snow so we weren’t able to go very far on any of them.
The road came out into Eureka and we found a gas station (a different, larger, and friendlier one than last time) and stopped for lunch (there weren’t any restaurants or fast food chains). After eating, we explored the city of Eureka. The main drag through town along the highway was lined by a few businesses and historic, mostly vacant, storefronts. Beyond the main drag, haphazardly laid streets ran with a combination of houses, churches, and trailers sprawled out along them. We started with the store fronts. All but one sat vacant except for storage. One almost looked to be set up like a museum so we talked to the only person we saw—a woman who worked at the only open shop, an antique store, who sat out front of her shop on a smoke break—to find out more information. She told us all of the buildings were owned by a man named Billy. Billy was planning to fix up the shops and open them for business, but he had a disagreement with Eureka’s mayor and is no longer allowed to renovate anything. The woman we met introduced us to Billy and he was super friendly. He gladly gave us a personal tour of a couple of his shops and told us many stories from his life, Eureka’s history, and about his stuff. One of his hobbies was exploring and he was also quite crafty. He’d taken things like an interesting tree trunk and carved it into a lighthouse with a race car track spiraling around the outside or some Native American artifact and found a beautiful way to display it. He was also a painter and some of his original artwork was displayed in one of the storefronts. Among the objects that weren't crafted by him included pictures of Eureka during its glory days and other antiques such as a fortune telling scale, an old bank counting machine, sleds, skates, a baby carriage, and many other treasures. One of the store fronts even had a water well right in the middle of the floor. During prohibition, it was a bar and the well was used to lower alcohol (brewed behind the false wall at the back of the building) into when the police came. We spent a good deal of time seeing what Billy had to show—it was so fascinating! It was more than we could have even hoped to come across!
After exploring the downtown, we perused the rest of Eureka. There was an abandoned house behind the store fronts that had a front door that hung open and we were actually able to explore the interior. On the south end of town, we explored some sort of blasting/mining site and also the Eureka cemetery. Overall, it was fascinating to see the different lifestyle of the area.
Further along the highway, we took the turnoff to Mammoth, UT: a semi-ghost town just minutes south of Eureka. Mammoth was a small cluster of houses and trailers, many of which were abandoned. We explored a trailer with a collapsed roof which was interesting but, because the town was so small, it was obvious we were outsiders and basically the whole town knew we were there (you could easily see from one end of town to the other). By the time we stopped at the next house, a resident of the city got upset at us so we left. Of particular interest in this town for me was the site of the Tintic Hospital. The hospital no longer stands, but a monument and this plaque mark the spot:
The next town we hit was Silver City. We were getting pretty lazy by this point though so we didn’t get out of the car but just observed from the vehicle and then continued north along the highway. We stopped in the town of Faust briefly to see a marker for one of the Pony Express and then in Rush Valley just to see what was there.
Our final stop on our list was Ophir. I was expecting another ghost town but was surprised to actually find more of a once-ghost-town-now-summer-tourist-trap/vacation-spot. Everything was closed and we were running out of time and daylight so we left for home with plans to visit again next summer. It looked like a quaint little town to visit with quite a few fun things to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment