Chris had a day off this week to spend time with his family and friends so we decided to take a day trip to some nearby ghost towns and explore.

We stopped at Homanville first and didn’t find a lot other than some brick foundations and a large cement structure. It was interesting nevertheless, to see the many broken bottles and rusted cans, deer bones, printed bricks, and try to guess where things might have been before the town was swallowed back up by sage brush and sand.

 

Then we went to Eureka, which is not a true ghost town as there are some people still living there but it’s chock full of abandoned historic buildings and fascinations. Especially interesting was Main Street, with the jail, post office, bank and police office.

Next we visited Dividend, in the hills not too far from the other three towns. It has many remnants of buildings and structures and a few still intact. We really had fun exploring the buildings, foundations, peeking in mine shafts, looking at the water towers and even finding some pyrite crystals. On the way home we did some research and found that Dividend was one of the most lucrative mines for silver in the area and had quite a large operation going on for many years by the Tintic Standard mining corporation, also running things in Eureka and probably many nearby mining settlements.

Here are some cylindric stone pieces we found lots of in one corner of a foundation:

Are they testing materials for ore? Are they used in the refining process? Are they remains of some game or recreation activity? Are they rubbish left from some processing or other? I don’t know.

Here is Lilah spying on Chris through one of the pipes that go through the ceiling, letting spots of light into the otherwise dark interior of this cement building:

On our way home we stopped briefly at Thistle, a ghost town due to flooding. Here’s what we found:

I’ve been itching to go visit more ghost towns and we were all so pleased that Chris could join us for this particular excursion. We’ll definitely be doing more ghost town adventures as well as rock hounding adventures which the kids are quite excited about.

After a full day of adventuring we had a lovely dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant and then we were off into bed and dreams.