Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Alphabet Soup
We've made it to the "E's"! Our "E" visit is to one of those places you just stumble upon and find you really, really enjoy.Imagine you live in a small community out in the middle of nowhere, beautiful, but still the middle of nowhere. It's just a bedroom community now, but in it's day.... That sounds like the description of the classic populated ghost town of today, someplace like Tombstone, Arizona -- tourist trap extraordinaire.
Now imagine such a place without the tourist trappings. Proud of their heritage, it has been preserved, but respectfully and interestingly, without the T-shirt shops and the touristy commercialism. A place where you can get a feel for an old mining town without being sold too much stuff or having to struggle in the utter wilderness. If you have that picture, you have Encampment, Wyoming.
Located in the south central part of the state, Encampment is somewhat unique for an old mining town. First of all it has never completed ghosted, it remains a nice community where people maintain nice modern homes. It's out of the way, but not so much so for many rural areas where the towns are 20-30 miles apart and there is a big town somewhere reasonably close for getting supplies.
But this picture shows you the real reason the town never totally ghosted -- it was a good distance from the mine and this overhead tram was used to move ore into town where is was processed. Thus the town is located in a nice tree laden valley instead of the usual stark mining landscape so many similar places find themselves in.
The people that live there can often trace their ancestry back to the founding of the town, and they are proud of it. They have a small community maintained history museum of which this bathtub pictured is the prize of the collection. Note the nice wood work on the end. The whole tub tilts up into the wood panel you see against the wall with the towels and takes on the appearance of a more typical wardrobe. As you can see -- it even has provisions for plumbing. It is in marvelous shape, even if made for people a tad smaller than average these days.Encampment was a fun little detour we took while exploring I-80 which is essentially the route of the original transcontinental railroad and it proved well worth the detour.
