Before Alta was known for powder days and lift lines, it was a silver mining town clinging to the side of a narrow canyon. In the late 1800s, men lived at 8,000 feet, went underground each day, and endured winters that regularly buried buildings in snow. This past summer, that mining town resurfaced — literally — during construction at the Alta Ski Area.
To understand what Alta really looked like, you don’t begin with legend. You begin with its trash — and this time, that happened almost by accident.
Alta Ski Area was installing underground water reservoirs to support snowmaking. Because the project sits on Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest land, an archaeologist was required to monitor the excavation. No one expected the trench to produce much.
But, It did.
Artifacts began surfacing almost immediately. Enough that the Forest Service contacted the Utah State Historic Preservation Office for help. Lexi Little, who coordinates the Utah Cultural Site Stewardship Program, helped mobilize nearly 30 volunteers to assist with what quickly became a focused two-week excavation.
Winter deadlines were approaching. The pipes for the reservoirs had to go in the ground. There wasn’t time for a slow, extended dig.
“It was two weeks of digging in the dirt and helping figure out exactly what we were looking at,” Little said.
Most of the people screening soil weren’t professional archaeologists. They were trained stewards from around Utah — part of a statewide volunteer network that now approaches 500 people. They poured dirt through shaker screens, scanning for fragments that could piece together a town long buried.
“Archaeology is human trash,” Little explained. “Archaeologists are very into trash.”
Alta had left plenty behind.
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Victorian-style ceramics appeared first — the kind typically used in hotels. Medicine bottles followed. Ink bottles. Hand-blown glass. A porcelain doll’s foot surfaced from the soil, a small detail that shifted the mental image of the town. Families were here. Children were here. This wasn’t only a camp of miners.
The bottles helped establish time. Manufacturing details — whether glass was hand-blown or mold-made, whether a maker’s mark appeared on the base — allowed archaeologists to date many of the artifacts to the 1870s through the 1890s, when Alta was booming as a silver mining town.
“That gives you that range of dates for when Alta was really booming,” Little said.
One reusable soda bottle clearly stamped “Salt Lake City” connected the canyon to the valley economy below.
Then something unusual rolled out of a dirt pile.
A corked bottle. Intact. Liquid still inside.
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