Frisco Ghost Town

The weather was so nice on Saturday that I had to go somewhere. I pulled out my ghost-town book and looked for some place that was both interesting and at least two hours from Salt Lake. I chose Frisco, because the book said it had standing structures but no people living there. "A most fascinating place." (Some listed ghost towns actually still have residents, such as Gold Hill in Tooele County.) Frisco is about 15 miles west of Milford, which is about 230 miles from Salt Lake (okay, it's four hours away).

Frisco is named for the San Francisco mountains, where it lived on the southern tip. I bet you didn't know Utah has mountains called the San Franciscos. I didn't.

I wouldn't have gone this route to Milford, but my Garmin GPS said to turn west from I-15 at Cove Fort, which took me about 25 miles across a gravel path, called Black Rock Road.

The road is very well graded with a speed limit of 50 mph, but it was recently graveled, which, in the Corolla, made it feel like driving on ball bearings.

Believe it or not, Black Rock Road has quite a few ball-bearing turns that gave the Toyota a bit of a dirt-track racing feel.

This windmill farm is growing just before Black Rock Road connects to Highway 257, which connects Delta to Milford.

After driving four hours, I finally arrived at Frisco. The book didn't say the silver mine was restarted in 2002, and the new owners have closed the area. Well, the road, anyway.

I ran into three other guys poking around here. Two were finding a lot of useless junk with their $800 metal detector. The other guy was from Salt Lake but living in Milford while working on the windmill farm. He said he'd done some archeology around the Chinese camps on the transcontinental railroad line and found opium pipes and other artifacts. I need to find a map of the old camps and head back to the Kelton area.

I also wish I had an old picture or drawing of Frisco to identify what each building was. I was told the owner of the garage in Milford has a picture that he's happy to show, but I didn't get back to Milford until all but the two gas stations and two diners were closed.

I called this building the assayer's office, because there are core samples all over the floor.

Core samples are what the miners drill out of the rock to see whether it contains silver. I checked a dark gray stripe on the end of one of these rock cylinders with my metal detector, and it beeped positive.

If the doors were open, you could run right through this house from the front yard to the back yard without stopping.

Between 1880 and 1885, 6,000 people lived in Frisco, which hosted homes, numerous stores, a hotel, a dance hall, a schoolhouse, a newspaper, a hospital, and 23 saloons. Frisco was known as "the wildest town in the Great Basin." Killings were common.

If you slowed down while running through this house, you could admire the fine wallpaper.

I like the view from this building.

Some of these buildings were built right against the tailings mounds, with the tailings making up the back wall.

I didn't explore in any mine tunnels, because I didn't want to drop 2,000 feet in a downshaft or be eaten by a mountain lion, but it was tempting. In 1885, the mine foreman kept his crew out of the mine due to some ground shaking. During the night the entire mine collapsed from bottom to top, and that was the end of the boom years for Frisco's Horn Silver Mine, after it had brought in $54 million.

This is the head gate at the top of the mine, where the miners pulled ore out of the mine. From 1885 to 1913, lingering miners brought up an additional $20 million worth of silver.

From the head gate the ore traveled down a short chute to this structure that dumped the ore into what I assume were rail cars. One of the roads in Frisco still has railroad ties buried in the dirt.

Frisco was a decaying ghost town with no residents by 1920. The surviving cemetery is outside the No Trespassing zone.

Two interesting discoveries: 1. Most of the headstones are for young children of one to five years old, and 2. Most of the graves have headstones and what I'm guessing would be called foot stones engraved with the buried person's initials. The headstones are very legible with dates around the 1880s and often include a saying about the lost child.

A mile or so east of Frisco are some kilns used to make charcoal to smelt the ore during Frisco's boom years.

The kilns sit like decaying stone mountains.

Sunset on the desert is usually beautiful. I guess it's a cliche, but it's a good cliche.

So I put two pictures here.

I'm pretty sure Butch Cassidy was hanging out in this house in Milford when I drove through town.

On the way home I skipped Black Rock Road and headed up Highway 237 to Delta, then to Highway 6, with a little side trip to the Baker Hot Springs west of the Intermountain Power Project.

Except for the stars, the sky was almost pitch black. So I soaked very quietly in the desert hot water and gazed at the Milky Way for a long time.