Mining the Past...

We drove a wide loop through Old Mesilla, Las Cruces, and Hatch ("World's Chile Capital") to arrive eventually and impulsively at Lake Valley, a silver mining town in the 1880s that is now a ghost town on BLM-managed land. It is located on NM 27, 13 miles North from the one-house hamlet of Nutt on NM 26, also known locally as "Hatch Highway."

Boom to bust and now dust...

We turned off on a dusty exit just as the range land ends and the hills begin. From Deming directly the ghost town is a drive of about 35 miles. Eleven structures survive in a dilapidated state from the town's heyday beginning around 1883 and ending around 1895: a few residences, a school house (that later became a saloon and even later a gas station), a chapel, a general store, a tipple, a depot, a wall, and not much more.

The Bridal Chamber...

Close to 3.5 million ounces of silver were taken from the mine that was the reason for the town. Called the "Bridal Chamber," it was an unusually compact resource of about 9 feet wide by 40 feet long, with the highest concentration of silver per ton of ore around. One tongue-in-cheek source in 1884 said the silver could be melted off the walls with a candle.

Poet Walt Whitman was an investor in the mine with 200 shares. The mine owner, Whitaker Wright, continued selling shares long after the mine had stopped producing silver, and along with others who had been duped, Whitman lost his shirt. Wright, when arrested and brought to trial in England, dramatically swallowed cyanide in the courtroom rather than go to prison.

Cool, huh?

Why go to a ghost town? It has to do with the quiet of the place after so much hustle and bustle during its economic boom. To do also, I think, with seeking a past to the present which at times makes no sense. For me personally, it has to do with the sculptural qualities of decay and breakage one finds in ghost towns, and a fascination with anything humans have abandoned and nature has reclaimed.