Santa Claus!!!

Good news folks! I found Santa. I wasn't even looking for him!

Apparently Mr. Claus likes to spend his pre-christmas days living in an abandoned mine in western utah. I know, tell you something you don't already know. But it did come as a bit of a surprise to someone who was not expecting to find santa standing at the doorway of an abandoned mine. Also, you can't see it in the photo, but the area surrounding the mine was covered in somewhat fresh-looking animal skulls. It would also seem that Santa enjoys the sweet, sweet taste of raw animal meat, probably to counteract all those cookies that he gets during his yearly trip. In short, Santa may or may not be some sort of jolly, ice age bear.

The truth about bears

Truth is that I don't like bears. Once I was on a scout adventure up in the Uinta Mountains and a bear attacked my tent while I was inside minding my own business. You know what it's like to have a bear attack your tent?

Luckily for me, the bear seems to of had a very short attention span, and after abusing my newly purchased K-Mart tent for about 5 minutes it pretty much gave up and went about whatever it is bears do during the day when they aren't destroying sensibly priced camping equipment. I had no idea (and still don't, for that matter) about how bears work. I quickly re-enacted every scene from the old Winnie the Pooh movies in my head, hoping to find some sort of lost information that may help me rid myself of this fuzzy menance. Sadly, I didn't have a single comically-shaped jar with a"Hunny" written on the side. So I stayed in the tent for a good 2 hours after the bugger abandoned his attack, as I was sure that he was simply trying to wait me out of my nylon shielding, perhaps sitting on a rock in a humorous yet patient fashion.

Heh, I love that bear. Honestly that's the only reason I'm making this post. Look at him! "Who, me? Dooo doooo dooooo...". Finally, I heard another scout walking by and figured that if he was still alive, then the bear must have given up on our camp completely. So I bolted out of the tent door (which the bear, in all his ignorance, was unable to figure out) and gathered the rest of the scouts to tell them of my harrowing tale of bear encounter-ment. Sadly, instead of being impressed, my fellow scouts were suspicious of my story, and the fools dared question the details. In the end, my scout leader said that it was one of the horses that we had brought along that attacked my tent. He even went so far as to say that "attacked" was too strong of a word. More like the horse sat down next to my tent and rested peacefully for the night. What do I think? I really can't say. I will leave that up to you, the reader, to decide*

*(probably a horse)

Important Information

I like this bear.

Thanksgiving

They say that Thanksgiving is the perfect time to ask your lady that important question, but I think it's ok to ask about STD's any time of the year.

Comic Con!

Last July I went to Comic Con. I took a ton of pictures because there probably isn't a better place for taking pictures anywhere in the world. Say you would like to see some sort of wolf/robot/ninja costume mixed all into one, all the while the person in the costume is juggling 4 or 5 cats. Sounds like you're out of luck, right? NOPE!! Comic Con is the place for you. I mention the wolf/robot/ninja costume because I saw that very thing at comic con, on the first day no less. That's when you know things are about to get real (imaginary).

SADLY! I promptly downloaded my pictures onto my computer in giddy anticipation of reliving the event in the comforts of my own room, like any good nerd would. Then, without warning, my computer a-sploded, and all the pictures were lost, and unlike a good nerd I don't seem to have any idea how computers actually work and therefore don't even know how I would manage to get them back. This may seem like a horrifying event, but don't you worry. I have committed the whole event to memory. Here's exactly what the wolf/robot/ninja person looked like (the juggling cats thing was made up).

There's not a whole lot of room at Comic Con. Personal space is an amusing afterthought. The first time I saw wolf/robot/ninja (wobotja) man was when we practically ran into each other. One minute I'm watching two people in crazy japanese cartoon costumes pretend to fight with WAAAAYYY oversized weapons, then the crowd gets a bit unruly and I feel myself bump into something. I turn around and there was the wobotja.

Someone once said that the only way to truely learn what kind of man you are is by judging your reactions under duress. I'm the kind of man who wets himself when a wobotja gets up in his grill. Not what I was going for.

But lets move on to Comic Con in general.

The first thing you notice about Comic Con is that there is an unending amount of stuff you can buy. Every table has some sort of goods, and at first you think, yeah, I may spend a few bucks. Very soon however, you notice that you have gone through $300 and all you have to show for it is a drawing of catwoman from some fellow who may or may not actually be associated with Comic Con, and his catwoman drawing looks a lot like, well, wobotja. It takes a while before a person realizes that there is an art to Comic Con, like being at the right place to get a drawing of something that looks like it is supposed to. It's a perfect balance between desire, accounting, the ability to slide through two people standing really close together, and some other things. Wanna know what it looks like to be at Comic Con as if you were seeing through the eyes of someone there? Here...

The one aspect that I can't draw is that that at least three of those people have just farted. You'll have to imagine that part. Also, not everyone has a single fang. I just don't know how to draw teeth. But the idea is that it's very crowded.

Now, you may think from the above posts that I didn't like my Comic Con experience, but nothing could be further from the truth. It's possibly the greatest event on earth. It has all the elements of a great hollywood movie. There's action (figures), there's drama (is Stan Lee finally going to go crazy and attack someone?), there's romance (somewhere, probably). Yes, it's the best time I've ever had.

And so ends my brief synopsis of Comic Con. I had really wanted to post pictures but they are gone and so we must endure.

Oh, and this happened....

FUZZ IN MY KEYBOARD!!

Huh. I thought it was an ant but it was just a bit of fuzz from my hoodie. Now I'm stuck with two posts about non-existant ants on my keyboard. Well, I hope you didn't give up anything important to read this.

ANTS IN MY KEYBOARD!!

Pottery...

I wrote this a long time ago for reasons that I no longer remember. But I'm too lazy to think up something new to write so I'm just gonna throw something old up here. Blah.



It's a funny thing, clay. You can spend so much time on a piece of pottery, I mean just pour your entire soul into a piece of art that defines you. Hours of labor, trying to get a product of the earth to listen to your inner spirit, to get it just right. And when you finally reach a point where you feel the piece symbolizes your internal motivations, dreams and hopes, some jerk with a really crappy piece of pottery will end up just blowing your pottery up. I was that jerk. And this is my tale.

I love making really crappy pottery. Well, I don't think it's crappy, but it is. My pottery is on the same artistic level as a drawing made by a kindergartner who has chosen to work in the chocolate pudding medium. This isn’t to say that I’m against foodstuffs in the art world, quite the opposite, but that is a topic for a different day. It was 1999, and I was still standing on the beach looking at the vast ocean of school work that separated me from the glorious island of graduation. Not to be defeated, I decided to jump right in and get some of my hardest classes out of the way, so I signed up for bowling, weight training (which I later withdrew from) and hand-building ceramics. Hand-building ceramics! I was going to earn college credit by whipping out some pottery that was so bad it could make the Keebler Elves commit ritualistic suicide. What a world! I quickly purchased the required tools for the course. Everything came in a little pack that was labeled “The potter’s buddy!” My first semester up at college and I already had “The potter’s buddy!” It even had the “!” after the title, suggesting that when someone saw you with “The potter’s buddy!” They would say to themselves “OH MY GOSH! THAT GUY HAS THE POTTER’S BUDDY!” If life could get better, I didn’t see how. My enthusiasm dimmed somewhat when I opened up “The potter’s buddy!” to find that I had paid nearly $40 for what appeared to be a plastic fork with the prongs broken off, some toothpicks, and a little bit of sponge. I guess most of the money went towards the little plastic bag that these wondrous tools of earthen manipulation came in. Well, I could go one about “the potter’s buddy” for hours, but that’s not what this story is about. So let me take you all back to the first day of class.

It was a full class, maybe 30 folks in all. The room contained 5 tables, so naturally each table held 6 eager amateur potters. The table that I had chosen had quite a diverse crowd. There was a gothic lady, a hippie, an athlete, a guy that looked like an angry hobo, a punk chick, and me. After the teacher had made some introductions and had talked about the goal of the class (it was to make pottery), she asked everyone to get out they’re tools and get ready for some potting. I proudly pulled out “The potter’s buddy!” in all of its glory, complete with broken fork and sponge, and set it in front of me, awaiting the admiration of my fellow classmates. But then I saw what the hippie brought. You see, it turns out that the good folks who made “the potter’s buddy” also made “The potter’s buddy complete!” It was like the regular potter’s buddy, except it contained additional objects, such as a spoon with no dimple in the spoon part, a wooden stick about yea long, a fancy little booklet, and some pipe-cleaner and a wooden block that was later used to prop up a broken stool. Pretty impressive stuff. Anyway, the way the class worked was that the teacher would talk about some sort of clayey wisdom for a while, and then she would just plob a big hunk of clay in front of us and tell us to create art or art-like object. So we would each go on our way. Around week four, the teacher came around to see what we had made. The gothic lady at our table had made this huge vase, complete with all sorts of crazy gothic thingamabobs on it. The hippie had made a highly detailed pottery box, (which I assumed would be used to hide doobies). In fact, everyone at the table had really impressive projects. That is to say, everyone except for yours truly. So what had I made? I had made no fewer than 2 dozen mugs. Each mug was exactly the same size, shape and color. When asked what my work represented to me, I though for a minute, and answered that I liked mugs, and that I seemed to have the ability to make a lot of them quickly. Hearing this, the gothic lady snidely said “Those mugs aren’t very good. That one has a hole in the side.” It was true; one of the mugs had a hole near the bottom, making drinking from it a dangerous proposition. I turned to her and said “Well, it’s a darn good thing I made 24 of them then, isn’t it?” From that day on, I didn’t really like the gothic lady.

The class passed as described about for the rest of semester. Near the end, I had completed (with the assistance of the potter’s buddy!) nearly a zillion mugs. I tried to make other things, but everything just turned out as a mug. Big mugs, little mugs, mugs with crazy shapes carved in the side. The gothic lady was doing a little better. She was turning out pottery that might actually be considered art, and not just a bunch of poorly made mugs. With every victory over my mugs she got a little more smug (ha!), or whatever gothic people get when they are proud of themselves. Less depressed, I suppose. Anyway, for our final project we had to build one last piece using all the different pot-making techniques that we had learned. It could be whatever we wanted it to be, but it needed to be impressive. I instantly went about getting the clay I would need to create the world’s most impressive mug ever. EVER! I mean, this bad boy was going to be the Mona Lisa of the mug world. If there was a magazine that featured nothing but mugs and mug accessories, this mug would be on the cover for the next 10 years. Such was my dreams for this mug. Mostly, however, I wanted to beat this gothic just once. Beat her with the mugs that she had so often mocked. Now, the thing that made her projects such a success was all the detail she put into her work. Every part of her vases, figures or whatever had some sort of pattern imprinted on them. I knew that I couldn’t compete with her with respect to detail, (she had the potter’s buddy compete), so I decided that I would simply make the largest mug EVER. No detail would be needed, as the shear size of this mug would overshadow her pathetic hard work.

And so it went. I grabbed a block of clay and used it to forge the one mug, the mug of power. Nearly a foot and a half tall, and approaching 3 inches thick on the sides, I was exhausted when my masterpiece finally took shape. I looked over at my undead loving competitor and saw one of the most amazing pieces of pottery ever. Before me stood an intricate dragon figure perched on the edge of a vase which was covered in a scene depicting the dragons birth, life and death. The wings of the dragon had each been painstakingly detailed to show the skin patterns. The vase part had a little place where she said that she planned to put in a pump and have water pouring down the side. Now, that was all very fine and good, but could it possibly stack up with a foot and a half tall mug? Maybe, so I pulled out a secret weapon. Thinking fast, I grabbed more clay, and formed the starship enterprise and deftly attached it to the top edge of my mug. Man, that was now one sweet mug. Confident, I picked up my masterpiece and headed for the kilns, where the fires within would breath eternal life into my creation, which I lovingly entitled “Enterprise mug that is huge.” After a few minutes of trying to get my project into the kiln, I finally managed to squeeze the sucker in there. It was so awesome. Right behind me, gothic lady with her stupid incredible masterpiece gave me a glare when she saw that the only space left in the kiln was right next to my work of art. She didn’t seem to appreciate my hogging most of the space, but what did it matter? I had the enterprise mug, and all she had was talent. Useless talent.

Now, I need to step aside here and just mention a funny thing that clay does when it is put in the kiln. There is a basic rule of thumb to keep in mind when working with clay in a kiln. You don’t want to have any piece of clay thicker than about half an inch in that sucker, or steam in the clay builds up pressure, and tends to result in a hilarious exploding side effect. I knew of this rule, but it had left my mind when I had the vision of the “enterprise mug that is huge.” Such was the grandeur of the mug I had created. Anyway, I left that day with a song in my heart and the knowledge that I had finally defeated my skilled foe.

I had to wait a week before we could finally open up the kilns and get our projects. I nearly went mad. I couldn’t wait to drink a gallon of milk out of my mug and then be greeted by the friendly crew of the enterprise between sips. Finally the day came. I went up to school early for the occasion, and eagerly awaited until the kiln room was unlocked. I raced in and whipped open the door…… It was amazing. I instantly gained a new respect for the power of steam. I remember seeing a picture once of the city of Berlin at the end of WWII. There was very little left standing, and the streets were filled with rubble that had once been a magnificent city. The sight that greeted me that morning was indeed very similar. Nothing remained of my “Enterprise mug that is huge”. Well, I guess it all still remained, but not in the form that it was in when I had placed it into the kiln. The same could be said for pretty much everything else that had been in the kiln at the time. Then I saw something that caught my eye. Lying beneath what had once been the bridge section of the enterprise lay an intricately detailed dragon wing. “OHCRAPOHCRAPOHCRAPOHCRAP!” I thought as I realized that while the destruction of my masterpiece was regrettable, albeit entertaining in nature, I had destroyed what was quite legitimately a masterpiece of pottery. My mind raced. What should I do? There was no question about whose piece was the cause of the pottery nuke. There was practically a crater around where my mug used to be. So I did what any honorable gentleman would do. I closed the kiln doors, spun around on my heel and made warp 10 out of the building. I never returned to that building, meaning that I left behind nearly a dozen of my mugs. But I considered that to be a fair trade for my awesome rampage of steamy clay destruction. I got a B- in the class.

That's all true, by the way. If anyone wants a mug, just tell me and I'll send you one.

The origin of things....

In these posts I discuss how things came to be....

Black Licorice

A couple of days ago my boss bought a huge bag of black licorice. Probably a good 3 pounds worth. I remember looking at the dark worm-like foodstuffs crowded into their thin plastic prison, eager to get free and spread a wave of uncontrolled gagging. Of course I didn't tell my boss that I hated the food he apparently love so much. While I'm sure my boss wouldn't fire me for hating his favorite candy, there's the possibility that he may be insulted by the knowledge that the materials he was consuming so readily was threatening my sanity. So I kept my mouth shut.

Then he offered me a big ol' piece. Seriously, it was probably the biggest, curliest, piece in the whole bag. Everything in me shouted "tell him to get it away from us!" but instead I politely accepted the devil-spit candy and sat there with it weighing heavily in my hand. I didn't know what to do with it. He sat there looking at me, waiting for me to wolf down this horrible little bugger. I had to think fast! I pretended to start to eat the licorice by moving it nearer to my mouth slowly, as if I was trying to savor the thought of having this miserable little turd of a candy in my mouth. Then, I quickly reached into my pocket and got out my phone and started laughing out loud at an imaginary text message. It was a weak plan that was even more weakly executed. But it worked. My boss shuffled off, taking his bag of black licorice with him. I promptly placed the liquorice on my desk, trying to figure out what to do with it. I should have just thrown it away, but I just cleaned my trash and if I threw it out then it would be there, sitting in the trash can for all to see. So this is how it ended up....

This was, of course, no better, as it was still evident that I hadn't eaten the licorice. So I had to come up with some way to conceal the errant confection. In another brilliant move, I grabbed a box of staples and....

And it has been this way for two weeks. I'm going to have to figure out a better solution to this because at some point I'm gonna need some staples. But for now everyone is happy.

Halloween Part III

Halloween is gone. Goodbye Halloween.

Halloween Part II

In honor of Halloween, here are some instructions on how to draw a spooky ghost ship thing.

Step 1 - Draw a haunted curved line. Don't make it TOO curved, or else the whole thing just ends up looking stupid. Likewise, don't make it too flat or else you end up with a haunted pirate raft and no one is scared of a haunted pirate raft. Except for Huck Fin.

Step 2 - No ship should be without a good poop deck. Draw one now. It's a straight line connecting the two points of the curved line. That's all the help I'm going to give you on this.

Step 3 - Pirates like to move around. Ghosts like to move around. So it only makes sense that Pirate ghosts would like to move around. Let's get some masts on this ship so that movements (not bowel) (possibly bowel) can take place. Masts are simply smaller, thinner rectangles. Put as many as you want. I've put three, cus awesome.

Step 4 - Masts are all fine and good, but without sails they're as useful as a two-legged bear. So put some sails on that bad boy! They can either be rectangles (as shown) or triangles (also as shown). I've chosen to mix the two. It's a message to other ships that these pirates don't play by anyone else's rules.

Step 5 - Ok, we've go some masts, and we've got some sails. Let's throw a crows nest up there so the ghost pirates can spot ghost prey from miles away out at, um, ghost sea. Also, right now this ship is looking like a very non-discript ship. Not scary at all. Why, you could tell someone that it was nothing more than a Italian Merchant clipper ship and no one would question you. Let's throw some pirate-themed signals and gestures up there. The cross and bones are a classic. Ooooo...Let's add a flag to keep ship moral up. Step 6 - Now, being crewed by ghost pirates is good, but it is cannons that rule the seas. Our ship needs cannons to earn the respect of the New World colonies. They think that they are Bee's Knees, what with their fancy fortresses and numerous muskets! Throw a few cannons on the side there so everyone knows we mean business. These are little more than rectangles with circles within them. Two different shapes combined for destruction! It's good to be a pirate! Step 7 - Almost there. Our ship still needs some finishing touches to make it a respectible pirate ghost ship. Put one of them busty mermaid vixens on the bow. Lots of ships have those. Don't go overboard (heh) with the bustyness though. This ship needs to be light and quick to catch the spanish armada treasure ships, and extra bosom will only distract the crew. Also, let's put a treasure chest up on deck, which implies that our pirate ghosts just got back from some sort of successful pillaging. Or maybe they just invested wisely, it really doesn't matter. Step 8 - Alright, last step. This ship needs a crew! Time to whip you your best skeleton pirates! The secret to drawing skeletons is to just keep it simple. Skeletons don't need a full set of ribs to be scary, just a skull and a bad attitude. Give'em a sword so they can dash their foes and hang'em from the yardarm (whatever that is)! Also, lets throw in some scenery stuff. For as long as man has been able to tilt his/her head towards the heavens, they have hated the moon. Curse that moon! So let's put one of those into the heavens to scowl down at us and our meaningless lives. Also, clouds at night are down-right terrifying. Some of you might recognize the clouds I have drawn are nothing more than the flatulence symbol that I have used in past drawings. Versitility is key to a good artist. Alright, put in saturn for that cutting, new-wave edginess that drives the kids wild nowadays, and maybe some sort of big, biting fish, and you are there.

Congrats! Make whatever modifications you deem necessary. But keep it within reason. Outlandish drawings only distract the observer from the true meaning of the work as a whole.

(Pirate ghosts are awesome)

Halloween

I wish things were more consistant in this world. You hang a dessicated corpse in your window on halloween and everyone is all "Ooooo, neato!" But you do it any other day of the year and people start crossing to the other side of the street when they walk past your house. Bah.

From the mines.....

A few days ago I looked down into a mine and found myself wondering how deep the bugger was. So I threw a rock down the hole and a mighty blast of pigeons came flying out of the ground. I guess my question is why would anyone walk away from a perfectly good pigeon mine.


Is that how you spell Pigeons?

Ghost Town Tuesday Part 2 - Electric Boogaloo

You know what? I think it's the term "ghost town" that makes ghost towns so interesting. If you named them "Previously inhabited locations (P.I.L.)" I bet ghost town visitations would be way down. No one want to visit a PIL.

Anyway, with that in mind, let's visit another one of utah's PILs by the name of Newhouse. If you misspell it and google "New House", then you get a bunch of prices for "Currently inhabited locations (CIL), which isn't all that interesting. Newhouse is somewhere in this zone....

You may notice that this zone overlaps with the Frisco zone from last week. Turns out the two buggers were pretty close to each other. When Frisco High played Newhouse High, I bet it was considered the "big game". In fact, it was probably the only game. And likely ended with all the players getting "consumption" or a bad case of "the vapors" and passing away. Old timey life was hard.

The story of Newhouse begins in 1870 and starts out with pretty humble beginnings. There really wasn't any mining (or miming) to speak of at that point, so probably the people who chose to live out there were the type of people you wouldn't want living next to you anyway. It was the sort of situation where dust was probably the leading concern of the village. And can you blame them?

All that changed in 1900 when a fellow named Samuel Newhouse bought a promising new prospect to the east of the town. There doesn't seem to be any pictures of Mr. Newhouse (for whom I'm assuming the town was named), but it really feels like there should be some imagery...Let's go with this guy...

There. Anyway, Mr. Newhouse had a dream to build a perfect little community and strike it rich with his new mine.

The mine in question is the famous (not famous) Cactus Mine, where silver and copper had been discovered. This place....

That's what it looks like now anyway. It used to be cooler. Newhouse took the dusty, stinky existing community and built a fancy dancehall, a restaurant and a bar located a mile out of town. The real pride and joy of Newhouse was the fully dust-free clubhouse at the center of town. Within it, a man could find both a library AND pool tables. Yes, it was good to be alive. But not for poor Mr. Newhouse. He died prior to the completion of the town.

These were probably sad times for the town of Newhouse. But luckily Mr. Newhouse II (his brother Matt) showed up and completed the town and started up the mine. He also built one of these...

A dome! Now Frisco couldn't lord their dome-dominance over the proud Newhouse folk. This dome was used to make charcoal, much in the same mannor as the Frisco domes. But this one is still in great shape. Yes, things were great in Newhouse, and stayed that way for a good 7 or 8 years until the mine puttered out of cactus ore.

Again, without a mine there really wasn't a reason to stay in Newhouse. The clubhouse was abandoned, and by 1914 the Cactus mine had been torn down and the good folks of Newhouse were no more.

If you head out to Newhouse nowadays, prepared to be disappointed. The clubhouse is gone. So is the bar. In fact, pretty much everything but the city dump has diappeared. But what a dump!

Also, off in the distance, this strange building is still standing...

Was it a mirage? Was I seeing the ghost of the clubhouse? Naw, it was just an old house that looked like it would give you tetanus and not feel bad about it. Anway, that's all the pictures I got of Newhouse. In the long run I suppose you could say that Frisco won the battle because there's more of it remaining, but if you really think about it neither of them really won at all. Makes you think.

Gumby

I bet when Gumby sees a case of Play-dough it probably makes him pretty uncomfortable.

Ghost Town Tuesday!

Alright, we've learned about a couple of rocks, we've seen some people puking on other people, we've even discussed little clay monkeys. Let's look into ghost towns a little. People like ghost towns, right? And are we not people? Right then. Let's go.

The ghost town of today is called Frisco. It's in Utah (where I live!). Sorta in this area...

Now, if you had found yourself approximately 14 miles west of Milford (not ghost town, but close) in the year 1875, you would probably be standing right in the heart of Frisco country. You had best not stand there for long though. From what I've read (which is surprisingly little) Frisco was a good place to get yourself shot. Or drunk. Or infected with some sort of STD. Someone once called it "Tombstone, Sodom and Gomorrah all mixed into one". So it was basically Tombomah. These people know what I'm talking about.

Yes, it seems like everyone was a king in Tombomah. But not everyone was content with numerous senseless murders. Some crybaby had to go and bring in some Johnny Law from Pioche to clean up the town. I guess this new law-man went all Catholic nun on the place and gave the "murder-inclined" two choices. Get out or get murdered yourselves. Murder was a pretty common solution back then. Anyway, this guy wailed on six other dudes his first night. And by "wail" I mean "shot in the body with a bullet". Things quieted down after that. Most people are pretty well-mannored in towns with murderous police.

If you travel out west of Milford, eventually you will wonder why people would ever choose to live there in the first place. Dust gets in your eyes all the time, and tumbleweed related accidents are incredibly likely. In fact, you couldn't even get water out there. The 6000 residents of Frisco had to have it shipped in like suckers. Well, I'll tell you why people would live out there.

(That's a picture of The King David mine. It's really hard to see. I'm no photograpy-expert.)

Yes, people lived out there cus there was plenty of silver to be had. All you had to do to get it was drop yourself down a 900 foot deep shaft on a rusty old ladder and swing a pick around. Like any good mine, the story of this mine's origins are dipped in trickery. In 1875 two fellas named James Ryan and Samuel Hawks found some shiney rocks sticking out of a mountain. Thinking that the ore probably didn't extend that deeply into the ground, the two thought they could sucker someone into buying the claim for $400. Some suckers showed up and bought the claim and made a cool $60,000,000 off it. The suckers became the suckies....or something.

During the golden (silver) years of the mine, the nearby city of Frisco grew to contain over 6000 folks. Plus it had one of these!

Every ghost town worth its salt has one of those. I feel bad for ghost towns without one. Looks like an early Chucky Cheese attraction. Anyway, things were really looking up for Frisco. Murders were down, silver was up, and a twisted metal pipe-thing had been recently purchased. But not all was well in Frisco-town. Starting in 1885, strange earth-moans had been heard throughout the mine. Then, on the cold, grey morning of February 12, the mine went splat. Luckily, no one was inside the mine at the time, but it's hard to work in a mine that suffers from a bad case of not being there anymore. Suddenly, there wasn't any reason to live in Frisco anymore. Realizing this, worried city officials purchased on of these....

But it wasn't enough. The Friscoians were a fickle bunch, and even a pile of rusted gears couldn't stimulate the dwindling economy. Without the mine, people didn't want to stick around and by 1912 the place was down to only 2 Starbucks. Then, like a worm burrowing through the mud, the town of Frisco simply faded away. If you go there now, expect to see a lot of stuff like this...

If you are a fan of domes (and who isn't), then today is your lucky day! Frisco used to be known as the "Dome-iest city in the Greater Central Utah area". (Not true).

These are the famed Frisco domes. They are actually old ovens where the good people of Frisco would make charcoal to fire up the smelter. All they did was tear down every tree they could find and invite this little guy to the party....

And Blam! Instant Charcoal. And all it took was devestating deforestation. Someone had put up a fence around the ovens, but then someone else tore it down. So I wandered to cash in on someone else's vandelism.

Wanna know what I found inside??

A hole! Stupid crumbly oven.

Finally, like all good towns, there needed to be a place to put yer dead. Frisco was no exception. You can't have dead folks piled in the streets! You need a good hill to put them! And so, Frisco cemetary was created. If you were rich I imagine you got a proper headstone, like so...

(Inscription says "Daring we miss thee". I thought this was sad cus now no one even knows who she was).

(This one says "Farewell my wife and children all

from thee a father Christ doth call

mourn not for me, it is in vain

to call me to your side again")

Just in case death wasn't depressing enough. Most of the headstones had little saying like this. "I'm dead, you're going to die, get over it" and such. It was terribly sad. Now if you didn't have money, I imagine your grave looked like this....

The classic "boot hill" look. Very popular with hobos.

The graveyard was mostly filled with children. Ages 0 to 5 appeared to be hard years. At least they have a peaceful place to rest. Sad place.

Anway, that is Frisco in a nutshell. Hope this was informational for you. Next week I'm going to New House, the second dome-iest city in the west!