Hiking through history on Montana Mountain, 1991-1995
My focus recently has switched back to scanning my files. While doing that a couple of days ago, I found some hike reports from 1993-1995, written as I was researching the historic mines on Montana Mountain for my first book, “Fractured Veins & Broken Dreams.” I carried a notebook, a tape recorder, and a camera on most of the hikes, and these reports were printed off on a dot-matrix printer.
As Montana Mountain is a very different place than it was 30 years ago, I decided to make a web page out of each of the 11 typed reports, with photos added from each of the hikes. I’ve also added two other hikes that, despite having no written record, I have photos of hikes that were significant – my first hike on the mountain, in June 1991, and another in August 1994 that took me out with four notable locals to legally stake mining claims just for fun.
The first photo shows Simon Hutton and me looking for a way down into Pooley Canyon, site of the historic Vault silver mine, on May 18, 1994. Simon, from Australia, was a student at Yukon College.
Next is the main support stand for the aerial tramway to the Mountain Hero mine, above the canyon crossing. This was on June 11, 1995. I had started an inventory of historic sites on Montana Mountain using black-and-white film – 12 rolls of film with a total of 327 images were donated to the Yukon Archives in September 1995.
The last photo shows the blacksmith shop at the Vault mine – this photo became the cover of “Fractured Veins.”
The access to those pages, which have a total of 67 photos, is Hiking through history on Montana Mountain, Yukon, 1991-1995.
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On first reading had forgotten to mention that the link on this page to the Montana mine sends me to the Jan 6 2024 post. Not sure when I first looked at that post, in case it did replace the other originally. Some TV show I saw in the last 3-4 months; someone drove by one of the mines you have featured many times in your posts, …I enthusiastically called out to my wife, ‘hey, there is Murray’s Mine…!”
The only link goes to https://explorenorth.com/articles/montana_mtn_hikes-1991-1995.html as it should.
Your stories are always interesting. Keep them coming! Happy New Year.
Thank you, Patsy. Happy New Year 🙂