Monte Cristo

Rebecca and I hiked to the former mining town of Monte Cristo yesterday. It consists of abandoned buildings from when there was mining for gold and silver. It is off the Mountain Loop Highway, right where the highway ends. It is a flat hike of 8 miles round trip. It was a hot day, so we left Ruby, Rebecca's black lab, at home and only brought her little poodle, Lance, with us.

The buildings were all wood, and built at the turn of the century, so there isn't much left. The building you see in the photo was put up by the National Parks department because there used to be a road you could drive all the way to the town and it had alot of visitors. Mother Nature has washed out the road, so now you can only hike to it.

There are rusting artifacts laying around everywhere, but the main attraction is this railroad turntable that was left behind. The writeups at the camp say that they tried to remove it also, and move it to a new location, but it was unable to be removed, so they left it.


We had lunch at the townsite, but it was cut short when we belatedly discovered gross little worms crawling over the picnic table.