Thursday, November 8, 2007

What is that Heron Mining???

The day was August 26th and we were itching to get out of the house. The rugrat was sleeping over at her friend's house and we had nothing better to do. It was a beautiful sunny day that shouldn't have been wasted. As always though, we spent a good 30 minutes or more trying to decide what we should do. Robin, finally came up with an idea after a little research online. We decided to take off and make our way to a part of the Big South Fork we had never been too. Well at least I hadn't been there.

After a good hour and a half drive or so we ended up at Blue Heron, an old mining town complete with all buildings restored to just shells. The interesting thing about this mining camp is that all the buildings are just skeletons of buildings with wooden cutouts of people, exhibits encased with plexi-glass containing various items such as books and pictures for the school house, bibles and church programs for the church, etc. Each exhibit had a big red button which upon pressing, you could here a tape recording of people talking about the place when they inhabited the camp some 50 years ago.

One of the funniest things was when we entered one of the building which contained life-size wooden cut-outs of people to which Clover apparently did find very trustworthy. To see her hairs stand up on the back of her neck and listen to her bark and carry on was quite funny. For at least a good five minutes she kept it up, barking and growling of the life-sized, lifeless, wooden people.

The camp still had what looked to be the original tipple which was pretty neat to see. By the end of the day we must have walked at least a mile or so around the whole place. Upon our departure we past the train bring tourists in from town. Our mission was accomplished and our day was wonderful.