Lordsburg, NMOct 16, 2010
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Old Car at Lake Valley Ghost Town
Old Home - can you pick out the lizard on the top...
Another Old Home, lived in until 1994
| Lordsburg, NM Our last day at T or C, we went exploring Ghost Towns. We found Lake Valley which was the site of over 400 silver mines, and is unique because it sits on top of a lake that is less than 100 feet under the surface of the land. The town was a boom town until WWII when the government ordered mining stopped. A few folks held on until the 1990’s. Today the only residents are 2 employees of the BLM who watch over the town. We are slowly making our way to Arizona, stopping at Lordsburg about 150 miles from Truth or Consequences. We decided to stay two days when we noticed a sign for Gila Cliff Dwelling National Monument. Not a lot to the town, but they did have a fascinating little museum. During WWII this was a of center for POW camps. There were camps here for the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. Lordsburg was picked as camp site because it was so remote. To escape you had to travel across miles of desert with few inhabitants. First thing this morning, we headed out for Silver City and the cliff dwellings. We knew the dwellings were about 40 miles outside of Sliver City, but we had no idea the kind of road we were going to be driving. Shortly after turning on to HWY 15, we came to a sign that said Cliff Dwellings 2.5 hour drive. We figured that must have meant round trip. Around the next corner, the HWY turned so narrow, that there wasn’t enough room to paint a center line and when meeting another car, both needed to put two wheels in the gravel shoulder. Jean was white knuckled most of the way and we both kept saying how glad we were that we had not brought the trailer with us. There would have been no way we could have made it around some of the hair pin turns. We only met 3 cars on our way in and lucky for us they were not locals and were crawling along just like us. It took us a full 2 hours to make the 40 mile trip. When we got to the monument we were lucky to catch a ranger tour and soon forgot the drive. Much smaller in scale than Mesa Verde, also much less commercial and the ranger was great. Well worth our time and energy climbing up to the dwellings. You should do it some time. Just as we were finishing up the tour, clouds started building and we had the fun of driving back in light rain showers. We planned on going to Mass at six, so we had to really push to make it back in time. We did make a short stop at the Tyrone Copper mine. Originally a tunnel mine, it was converted to an open pit mine and the slag piles in the picture is only one of 8 piles. Basically they simply level a mountain and build a new one with the left over slag. Tomorrow we hope to make it to Tombstone, AZ and the OK Corral, we will probably stay a couple of days and then Tucson as our last stop before Phoenix. |
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