Looking through the loading platform of Frontenac Mine toward Black Hawk. In 1900, you would see Druid Mine on the left and Aduddell on the right.
history under ground
rotten
Before each warhead was crated, it was inspected.
Judging from old pictures and maps, raw ore was dumped through these hatches, stamped into a rough powder, and hastily sorted before sending the best ore to the mill. Mills charged by tons of rock sent to them, so it did not pay to send them obvious tails.
Above the offices is this little section of factory that still has strips of wood flooring. This may be where the upholstery was cut.
Some of the rotting clothes were in boxes, split long ago from moisture. Others were just heaped in piles.
Tarpaper telling time-
Wood wittling weather-
Rust rot ruins.
Modern ruins of the Gilman-Belden tram…
Ultimately, it was the bad roof that doomed these buildings.
The bathtub fell into the basement, ala The Miller’s Tale. That’s right. Chaucer.
This volume gauge could be read from 30 feet away, which is useful when the control panels and valves are that far away.
When I wasn’t paying enough attention on the rotten balcony, I accidentally put my foot through a rotten floorboard. I snapped a picture to remember the moment.
For 20 years, this served as the public library. According to blogger, this has been moved to Springer.
Stairs and power lines enter the abandoned depot. Shingles slide off the rotten roof. Ektar 100/Mamiya 6
“Paint the fence,” they said, but I don’t feel like it… who cares, anyway.
Here, the concentrated gold (and silver, and zinc, I would guess) would be loaded into trucks bound for the smelter.
An unshielded heaframe and single pulley.
This skyway, built to help seal off two parts of the complex during an out of control fire, was probably too rotten to burn by the time I saw it.
An unintentional skylight makes the inside of the office glow, showing the inside of the front door and its strange lock.
Camera: Pentax 67.
This was taken before the top of the docks really started to rot-out; now this stretch past the crane is distinctly unsafe to cross. Still, you can’t beat the view of Dock #2 winding into the distance, where the approach is chopped-off before the yard used to extend.
A sentinel stands watch over an abandoned Hannah, ND house. Medium Format.
Artifacts from the days this was a furniture factory and warehouse.
The bottom of the tailings boom is rotten. In days when the dredge, floated, gangways connected it to shore, it seemed. You can see the size of the pontoons under the boat here.
The floor in this building (now demolished) was very rotten. This picture was taken through a window from very firm ground.
The top of Dock 4 was too dangerous to explore, but this panorama gives you an idea of the view (and how rotten the wood was).
This rockhouse was added below the shaft to load Gilpin Tram cars.
At an abandoned mine railroad.
The depot of Ringling is a very lonely looking building and there are many holes in its roof. There are no signs on it whatsoever.
The tailings boom is the first and last thing you see when approaching the mountaintop shipwreck.
When I first saw Ogilvie’s from the ground, I promised myself to look back when i found my way into this little pitched outcropping which seemed to have the best view of Thunder Bay I could imagine. It turns out, though, that there is no floor in that section; it is just extended machine access! Oh well. Mount McKay in the background in the last light.
Upper Prize Street in Nevadaville earned the nickname ‘dogtown’ when a pack of dogs took over the abandoned houses.
On the scale of the big machine shop, the huge piles of clothing look insignificant.
Frontenac’s shaft house is well preserved, compared to all other around it. Leica/Summilux 35/Ektar 100
A color study of the rotting donated clothes in the former GB&S Machine Shop.
There’s no way an explorer, much less a choir, could stand here now. Since this picture was taken the roof has collapsed onto the loft.
There is a flipped tram car about a third of the way down the cliff.
It’s not a good sign when you can see the chimney through the roof.
It seemed the only way to get a view of the room was to climb above the mounds of rotting donations, now not even fit to burn.
Squinting from the top floor through the skyway, one can feel small, like they’re in a heavy industrial dollhouse.
This building had the rusty remains of a few mattresses, likely used in the 1940s when this site was last occupied.
The gold mine is now a gravel pit.