Ghost Towns – Yosemite Nature Notes – Episode 25

Ghost Towns – Yosemite Nature Notes – Episode 25

MALE: When you hike up to Dana Village the
first thing you encounter is this stone cabin it’s a very curious feature there’s not
much else up here and you might wonder why is there stone
cabin here in this place seems kinda random and the more you
wander around the upper part in this ridge, you see evidence
and these cabins all over the place and you wonder what were people doing up here? the next thing you’ll notice about this
area is that the rocks here are very different unlike the rest of Yosemite, which is
granite, these are older metamorphic rocks and the contact
between those two rocks is a great place to find things like gold and silver so if you’re a miner walking around
here in the 1880’s or 1870’s, and you were looking for places to mine, these rocks are exactly the kind of
things you’d be looking for. FEMALE: These mines are right about 11,000 feet above sea level up there, even in the summertime, it can get windy and cold and these miners actually spent the winter up
there so imagine gale force winds, so much snow,
avalanche danger they’re really working under difficult, cold conditions. STOCK: and of course, they were working very hard they’re moving rocks by hand, digging by
hand through rocks it was probably an incredible amount of
hard work and suffering but they were motivated
because if it paid off they were going to be
rich CHAN: Because there’s this promise and speculation that this was going to be the largest silver ledge of the whole Sierra Nevada range and a lot of speculators and assessors
were thinking it was worth millions of dollars and that’s back in the 1880’s. STOCK: and it didn’t take very long digging by hand into these very hard rocks to discover that they needed some more equipment in order
to dig kinda tunnels that they knew they needed to dig CHAN: as they got more and more people
interested in it they decided to build a little town below the mountain peaks and start tunneling through the mountain. and so there was a decision to bring in
hydraulic pumps and equipment to help these miners get through the mountain faster and they decided to bring 16,000 pounds machinery and equipment
from San Francisco STOCK: and amazingly they did all of this by
hand, by human power in the wintertime, dragging the equipment on
sleds from Lundy Canyon to Bennettville which is
a few miles and several thousand feet elevation gain. CHAN: A lot of rope and tackle just to pull it up the mountain range. It took them two
months and at the end of that, the head foreman said
“Now I know why men grow old.” STOCK: and when they finally got the equipment
to Bennettville in May of 1882, they knew they needed a better way to get equipment there so beginning in 1882 and 1883 they built a
road to Bennettville from Big Oak Flat, across the Sierra Nevada and that road today is essentially the
Tioga Road. there are various reasons why the mining ultimately stopped but more than
anything it had to do with investor interest. With years going by, a lot investment, no results eventually
they moved their investments to other more profitable mines CHAN: so the Golden Crown Mine is right near Mono Pass, which is about
ten thousand six hundred feet above sea level and right there there are still some the
whitebark pine trees and that’s what miners used to build
their houses. That does feel like a ghost town to me. I don’t know if it’s the wood and the wood just has this decayed look. It’s very aged wood. It still looks really in good
condition for being around for over 120, 130 years. STOCK: When you’re visiting these
mine areas, it’s very important to remember that
these are historic sites. The cabins are fragile, we need to preserve those. CHAN: The National Park Service is here to
protect both the natural and cultural resources and the mining history in Yosemite is a significant story in human history in the human history of Yosemite National Park. STOCK: For me as a geologist this area is
fascinating just because of the rocks but I think really more of the value of
this place is in the history not just the written history but the
history that you can still see today in the form of these cabins, the mine shaft themselves some of the remnant materials that’s really where the real value of
these ghost towns lies.

Sitting on the crest of the Sierra Nevada, Tioga Pass is a gateway to Yosemite’s past. In 1880, a gold and silver rush erupted here, and miners flocked to Tioga Hill in droves.
Today, the ghosts of these miners work can be seen in the stone walls of Dana Village,rusty machinery at Bennettville, and the log cabins of the Golden Crown Mine. Even today’s popular Tioga Road was once a simple wagon road built to access the wealth of minerals that were never found. For an audio described version of this video, go to https://youtu.be/qG6SYCZhiQ0.