High Kountry Airedales Pack: Miley Delight

Happy New Year! Yes, Mommy is behind on the bloggy again.  She's been buried in an avalanch of report writing generated by our 2011 projects.  We got to visit Miners Delight in October, now a tiny ghost town enrolled on the National Register of Historic Places. Located at about 8,250 feet, Miners Delight occurs south of Lander, WY amid the Wind River Mountains. It lies within the historic South Pass/Atlantic City region known for gold mining around 1867-1895.

The Miners Delight lode was discovered in 1867 which led to the development of the surrounding town (Hamilton City).  Seventeen structures occur including cabins, a blacksmith shop, a cellar, shaft house, butcher shop, saloon, etc. A small cemetery lies south of the townsite near the modern crowned road. The Bureau of Land Management installed interpretive signs and stabilized (to varying degrees) several of the old structures to avoid collapse.

Gold was reportedly first discovered in the South Pass area in 1842 with the initial lode claims filed in 1867. The Miners Delight lode was discovered in September of that year.  A ten-stamp mill was erected in January of 1869. By mid-summer of that year, it had extracted an estimated $65,000 of gold from the Miners Delight ore.   A fairly large sum for 1869, $65,000 went alot further then than now.

Okay, history summary complete - time for photos (clicking on them makes them larger) before I bore everyone to sleep. Unfortunately, it was getting cloudy and late in the afternoon when we were there so the lightening, especially in the trees, was far from ideal.