Black Friday Getaway

I can't think of a better way to spend the day after Thanksgiving than getting away from all the stores and the Black Friday shoppers. So Randy and I headed to Carbon County to see what kind of ghost towns we could find.

Helper is not a ghost town. It's just the first stop on the way to Spring Canyon. Helper was once a railroad town, serving all the coal mines in the area. Today, it's one of the surviving coal-mining towns with an old-fashioned downtown.

This miner statue is actually in the downtown district. And he's Paul Bunyon tall.

Spring Canyon, just west of Helper, has the largest concentration of ghost towns in Utah, all former coal-company towns. We tried to keep track of which town was which, but our map didn't seem to match marker posts on the road, so I'll just call the whole place Spring Canyon, the name of what I think was the largest town. This is the Mutual Store (Mutual is one of the towns) in the upper part of the canyon.

Inside the store.

An outside corner of the Mutual Store.

The last of the homes was abandoned in the 1960s.

These homes or dormitories near the bottom of the canyon were built of brick and stucco.

The Spring Canyon bathhouse, where the miners changed their clothes.

The Mutual Store.

Notice the coal in the mortar of some buildings.

The bathhouse.
This mural on an inside wall looks like Mt. Fuji or some other volcanic mountain.

It doesn't take long for the sagebrush to take over.

Possibly a living room.

McDonald's.

A patch of area near the bathhouse had been recently burned.

This truck hasn't run in many years, I'm sure.

That was Friday.

Friday night we stayed at the National 9 in Wellington. Two funny things happened. First, I called Google 411 to get the number for the motel to check on rates. I called about four times, each time enunciating "Utah" more clearly and slowly than the previously time, but the pleasant recorded lady kept saying, "Ok, Wellington, New Zealand."

The other incident wasn't so funny. Actually, it was, well, read on. We drove through Price looking for a place to eat that wasn't a chain and found the Silver Steakhouse. So we ate there. Prime rib was the $15 special and the cheapest meal on the menu, so I had that. It was just okay. Back in the motel room we decided we wanted a piece of pie. We walked to the motel's cafe, but it had closed 15 minutes earlier at 8 p.m., so we walked to the gas station across the street to get a Hostess fruit pie. That seemed depressing, so we decided to go to Wellington's only other restaurant, the Cowboy Steakhouse. It's a large uninviting brick building with no windows and looks like a large bar or jailhouse. But we just wanted pie, so we figured we couldn't go too wrong. It had to be better than a Hostess fruit pie.

Inside was a bar but also a good-size restaurant with several tables and a nice fire in the fireplace. We asked for pie. Sorry. No pie. Just banana foster (with rum sauce). So they hadn't made their full transition from a bar to a restaurant. The foster came with a scoop of ice cream, and we could get just the ice cream, so we opted for that. We were the only customers.

A woman sitting at the bar came and sat by us and started talking. I think she was the owner's wife, and I think she'd been testing the bar's fare nightly for the past 50 years. At least she had on this night. She asked where we ate dinner, and she scoffed and chastised us when we told her. "Why would you eat there? You shoulda come here." Skilled with the use of many colorful words, she visited with us the whole time, while we ate our $4 scoop of vanilla ice cream with Hershey's chocolate sauce. She told us how people from Wellington hate people from Salt Lake, and hate people who come down here and take pictures and then pass laws made for Salt Lake but that Wellington gets stuck with. She also told us that if we wanted to see anything in Nine Mile Canyon we needed an old timer to show us around. Then she told us we had to come back for breakfast and we had to order a breakfast burrito.

Finally, we brain-freezed our ice cream down, and she went back to the bar and told the other workers that we were coming back the next morning for a breakfast burrito, as if we would ever cross that threshold again. On the way out I heard the server say, "It's just nice to have a couple of people in here." What would have been nice is a Hostess cherry pie at the Sinclair station.