The Mayflower Mill is one of the last fully intact mills in the Silverton, Colorado area. Also known as the Shenandoah-Dives Mill, it was the most advanced flotation mill for its time.
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Mayflower Mill
Buffalo Boy Mine
The Buffalo Boy was a small gold and silver mine which started production around 1930. The mine is caved but the interesting thing about the site is the long and steep tramway heading up to it. The tram line is over 8,500′ in length and rises 2,500′ up cliffs to reach the mine at 12,550′ in elevation.
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Hand Painted Pueblo, Hovenweep National Monument
These are the remains of a small pueblo village site inside Hovenweep National Monument and surrounded by the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.
The pueblo was probably built in the 1200s by Ancestral Puebloans (Anazasi). This tower is along the side of a canyon and completely below the rim. We couldn’t see it until we were close. It is an interesting and special place.
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Cutthroat Castle, Hovenweep National Monument
The Cutthroat Castle pueblo was built around the same time as the other Hovenweep puebloan ruins. Although the pueblo itself looks small, there would have been many people living around it in the area. The site is along a canyon and is unusual in that it had a kiva built on top of a boulder and not underground. Perhaps the terrain of the site simply wouldn’t have allowed it. The site is way out in the middle of nowhere but worth the journey.
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Underground near Silverton
These are underground photos from a mine in the Silverton area that we explored. I actually didn’t have much underground time planned for this trip, but the mines we did check out turned out to be fantastic.
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San Juan Chief Mill
This scenic ruined mill site was built in the late 1890s and never saw ore from its namesake, the San Juan Chief mine. It is the second mill to be built on this site. In 1900, it had 2 roasting furnaces and 15 stamps.
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Robidoux Inscription and Pictographs
On a late autumn day in 1837, a fur trapper from Santa Fe, Antoine Robidoux, stopped along a narrow canyon in the Territorio de Alta California (what is present day Utah). Beaver pelts were surprisingly lucrative at the time and, as hard it is to believe today, the Uinta River was a haven for them.
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