Published: September 8, 2016 |

Mining ruins near the base of Boulder Peak. This ghost town was named Boulder City and was once Idaho's highest town.
[Click image to enlarge]

As mining towns go, Boulder City scraped the top of Idaho’s sky.

Perched at 10,000 feet in a 500-acre cirque of rust-orange shale and Kelly green mountain meadows, this mining ghost town was about as high as you could go in a quest for gold and other precious minerals.

Gold was discovered here — on a mountaintop about 12 miles north of Ketchum — in 1879 by miners who had fanned south from the Bonanza-Custer area combing every mountainside and creek bed in search of fortune.

These driven men worked their way south along the East Fork of the Salmon River, climbing over the 11,300-foot Boulder Peak divide that sits 1,600 feet above the mining site. You can still see a faint trail line etched into the talus slopes.

They removed $1 million worth of ore from the shale-covered mountainsides before 1900. And between 1900 and the mid-1980s, miners removed another 110,000 ounces of silver, 610 ounces of gold and 1.3 million pounds of lead.

Today Boulder City, founded in 1881 as the second city in the Wood River Valley, ranks among one of the best preserved mining towns in south-central Idaho, though heavy winter snows continue to take their toll year after year.

This makes it an excellent destination for adventurers — hardy adventurers.

The ghost town lies about seven miles off Idaho 75 up a rocky, narrow, winding road that can be reached by four-wheel drive, ATV or horseback but is most often accessed on foot.

Those driving regular vehicles will definitely want to stop driving by the time they reach the first creek crossing. Hikers can cross it via a ragtag bridge constructed of log beams with lumber and tree branches laid on top.

From here, you’ll gain 2,300 feet of elevation as you trudge up a road that is covered by shale and a thin layer of water in some spots. But there’s plenty to see along the way, including a couple of cabins, a beautiful waterfall that spills over green moss on Boulder Creek and vast mountainsides of rock colored in shades of rust by the minerals.

Ben Black, a young Hailey carpenter, examined the dovetail fittings in the cabins along the way.

“The craftsmanship is pretty remarkable,” he said.

Fireweed lines one side of the road, while lavender lupine and penstemon dot the other side. And everywhere are mountain scenes with evidence of mining activity that will take your breath away.

“It’s fascinating — a real walk back into history,” said Hailey resident Mila Lyon. “Just walking the road, we’re transported to a different place and time. The stories that could be told!”

At the top hikers emerge into a different world — a wide meadow surrounded by mountains.

Past an old wooden rocker — used to separate gold from rock — is the town, which once boasted 80 buildings, including a store, a post office, a saloon and a 12-foot-square Swedish bathhouse that served as a sauna. The ore-processing mill looms over the rest, its tattered lumber standing over a rusted steam engine.

The century-old Boulder City hotel still stands, although bowed to the ravages of time and nature.

Also visible are the remnants of a 1,200-foot double cable that miners used to haul ore out of the Sorenson mine.

At the end of the day, miners would leave a 4-foot-tall metal bucket loaded with ore at the top of the cable. Then they’d ride up to the mine in a bucket powered by the weight of the ore coming down.

Dark holes in the rocks above represent the mouths of mining tunnels that stretched anywhere from a quarter-mile to 15.

The rock is so hard and solid that miners didn’t need to shore it up as they do many mines.

Miners hauled their take out via donkeys over the 11,000-foot pass north to the Challis area for the first two years. Then in 1883, when the railroad came to Ketchum, they began hauling it in wagons down the narrow, winding road along Boulder Creek, chaining trees to the backs of wagons to slow them down.

Some mining towns virtually shut down in winter, but miners here continued to work even when 20 feet of snow had settled in the valley below.

The Swedish sauna and a whiskey still were the miners’ concessions to comfort in a winter environment where avalanches snapped pines like toothpicks, the nearby fishless lakes froze solid and mountain goats were the only things that moved, history buff Doug Money said.

Mining ceased in the 1980s, but some speculate there’s still a lot of gold left.

-  By:  Karen Bosssick. Times-News