The cold cold creak

June 19 2021

We’re just outside the small town of Mackay ID. The campground is on a small lake, From our site we can see the water and mountains with a few patches of snow.

I don’t know about the other small towns in this valley but there were a few mines operating in this area, the town and historical society have worked to preserve that heritage. They worked with the government and local land owners to preserve some of the mine buildings and make them available to the public.

They set up a self guided tour, you get a map from the museum, following signs drive up into the mountains and explore. The map shows 3 kinds of roads, cars, high clearance vehicles and then off road vehicles less than 50 inches wide – side besides, 4 wheelers and motorcycles. They put a lot of money effort into creating signs at most of the stops. It’s kind of a draw for the off road crowd.

The bad thing is after they invested all of the money into the signs & stuff a new mining company has reopened a mine and had cut off access to 3 roads. The supplemental paper work said the roads weren’t going to be closed until July, but as we found out, they’re closed now.

The map had our route as a loop. We went up this one road a portion of it was large rocks, I even debated turning around but we slowly crawled our way up,  stopping at the sights, we get to the top and ready to return to town and the road it gated. The only down off the mountain was to go back the way we came up, across the rocks. I was not impressed AT ALL!!!!

Going up the other side of the mountain there was confusion about the roads and road conditions so we kinda gave up. The road with the rocks was listed as High clearance vehicles, meaning not cars, well without the 4 wheel drive we never would have made it up. Now we’re reading a sign that says you need 4×4 because the road is rough and rutted, that’s the reason we turned around. Was afraid the road was a little to rough for my taste. By ourselves we didn’t want to chance it.

I’m sure glad we didn’t meet anyone, a good portion of the roads are on the side of the mountain and just wide enough for the jeep with absolutely no place to pass.

The roads being closed I think is really going to hurt the visits to the mine and that is such a shame because they did a really good job with the signs and stuff.

You may recall I have mentioned the heat once or twice, up in the mountains we talked to some locals who said that last year at this time we probably could not made it to the upper most mine we made it to because the roads were still covered in snow. They said last year they really didn’t have a summer and this year it jumped from snow to HOT with no real spring.

One mining company built a tram system to get the ore off the mountain instead of a train. The sign said the cable was 1 & 1/4 diameter and was 16,000 feet long. That’s a lot of weight to be dragging up and down the side of a mountain and get it strung up across 36 towers back in 1917!

Once we came down from the mountain we made a stop at the museum.

Now about that cold cold creek. Since the roads cross private land, there are cows everywhere, we had to go through a gate. Not a problem you stop open the gate drive through, and close the gate. Well, it just so happens this gate is right at a creek and is about 6″ deep. We opened the gate on the dry side drove through, now to close the gate someone, me, had to wade barefooted across the creek, close the gate and wade back. The water was SO COLD I thought I was going to need to sit down once I got back across the water and hold my feet they hurt so bad. I managed to make it the 10-12 feet to the jeep, by then most of the pain was gone. Because we couldn’t continue the loop Mary had volunteered to open the gate once we got to it, fortunately for her,  just as we reached the gate we were passed by a side beside and they were kind enough to sit tight for 3-4 minutes and hold the gate open so Mary lucked out. The girl holding the gate open had on flip flops and shorts so she didn’t need to take off her shoes and socks like I had to.

More goo below

One last note, we passed through the town of Arco a couple of times, It’s claim to fame is it was the first city in the world lighted by Atomic Power.

Other pics from our stay.

See more pictures at RMTravels on Facebook and RMTravels.smugmug.com

The End