Whistles, Bells & Mountain Peaks (part 2)

Clear Creek, with the loop bridge in the background

After leaving Echo Lake, we had a fairly long drive to Georgetown, the site of large mining operations for gold and silver, predominantly, but also recently for molybdenum.

The main attraction here was for use to ride on the Georgetown Loop Railroad.  This is a narrow-gauge steam train that runs from Devil's Gate Station at the bottom of the valley up to Silver Plume station higher up.  The trains of the 19th century did not have enough power to make it directly up the mountain, hence the loop in the track that crosses from one side of the valley to the other to reduce the overall gradient of the climb.

Engine had to work hard on a steeper section

All of these pictures an be clicked on to see larger versions.  However,  I don't appear to be able to get all the pictures to line up nicely as I would like, so the page layout has gone a bit strange.

I also have several pieces of video of the train.  We had only a few minutes at Silver Plume, as we had to get the next train back and we weren't doing the Mine Tour either, so came all the way  back down to the bottom again.

The journey took about 15-20 minutes each way, and there were 6 carriages, two open-top ones and 4 covered ones.

Georgetown

 

After the train journey, we went to the town of Georgetown itself.  It is as if time hadn't really moved on there in decades.  It was very picturesque.  Darcy was telling us that this was one of the locations used in the filming of the Clint Eastwood (and Clyde!) film Every Which Way But Loose.

Almost all of the shops are tourist shops in this historic part of the town.  The "real" townspeople live on the roads further along, in very expensive looking properties.  After leaving Georgetown, we had one final stop at a museum in Idaho Springs to see some exhibits about the mining.  There was a mine car full of gold ore!  However, it's so difficult to extract it from these rocks (and indeed from most of the mountains), that it's not economically viable to do so - so all the silver and gold is left just sitting there.

After leaving Idaho Springs, we had a relatively easy run back into Denver, despite all the traffic heading to Mile High Stadium for tonight's NFL season opener (and Super Bowl 50 rematch) between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers.   It would have been nice to go to that too, but we were back just too late, so I had to go out to dinner and settle for watching the match on the TV.