Utah’s Underground Legacy Utah’s mining history is rich in ore, lore, and gore. Tales of lost mines guarded by winged seraphim and the spirits of Native American warriors have become the stuff of legend, recounted in campfire tales at Boy Scout camps and lauded by authors eager to exploit the greedy tendencies of gullible readers. It’s fascinating stuff, and fables, true or not … [Read more...]
Hobby Farming in Utah: Gov’t Forces one Man to Sell Land
Thistle, Utah— Having driven for nearly 20 minutes in this town, the appearance could best be described as charmingly post-apocalyptic. There are many abandoned homes and former farm facilities. A few totally flooded roadside residential properties now serve as a rest stop for ducks and habitat for fish. The rains have made the pastures rich and lush, the hills are dotted with A … [Read more...]
Mea Culpa Correction
We'd like to apologize to the town of Mount Pleasant, Utah for a mistake we made in our June issue. In our article - Why Randy Made His Farm a "Hobby" we described Mount Pleasant "as charmingly post-apocalyptic," with abandoned homes and farms. We were actually driving through Thistle, Utah a ghost town left behind when the service they provided for railroad cars was no longer … [Read more...]
Ghost Towns of Utah
Frisco, Utah – population zero – is in Beaver County outside of Milford. It may be dead now, but at one point it had a reputation as the “Wildest Town in the West.” According to Stuart Burgess, a mining and ghost town aficionado, it was described in its day as, “Dodge City, Tombstone and Sodom and Gomorrah all rolled into one.” In 1875, Jim Ryan and Sam Hawkes discovered … [Read more...]
Utah Ghost Towns
When visiting the ghost towns of Spring Canyon UT, bring water, sunblock, and your imagination. Utah ghost towns. The words resonate in the mind, conjuring mystery if not magic. How does a town become a “ghost”? Who were the people who once lived there, and what stories did they leave behind? Ghost towns live as much in the imagination as they do in their physical sites, which … [Read more...]
Bluff Utah Outlaws & Misfits
When you think "small towns in Utah" you might imagine rednecks, truck stops and OHVs. Bluff, Utah defies all the stereotypes in the crowd of intellectual drop-outs they have attracted. By the 1930s, Bluff had become a town that was used up and discarded. From the time when it was settled by Mormon pioneers in 1880, Bluff was hostile Indian territory and was intended to … [Read more...]