Gold Belt Tour
Phantom Canyon Road Part 1

And wouldn't you know it: at the narrowest point in the road so far, I come across oncoming traffic (there was another vehicle right behind this one in the tunnel).

So I'm still on Phantom Canyon Road following an old railroad track bed. You might see concrete in the little bridge before the tunnel but there was none inside. This was blasted out of solid rock. And they ran a train carrying tons and tons of gold ore through here for more than 20 years. The things people will do for a few bucks... okay, okay, a lot of bucks. But back in those days an ounce of gold was pegged by federal law at $32.00 and it stayed at that price until Congress took us off the gold standard about 40 years ago (when gold began its' dizzying ride to somewhere around $555 per ounce today). And the higher the price of gold goes, the more willing folks are to destroy massive pieces of countryside to dig out a few more ounces. Then there's this wonderful "heap-leach" extraction method that has been evolved to remove even the tiniest amounts of gold from massive amounts of rock by leaching it with large amounts of an arsenic-cyanide mix. Despite all the government regulations and industrial precautions this arsenic-cyanide mix keeps making its way into the surface waters and aquifers... but enough of this nonsense, it's time to go through the tunnel.