Paul Bunyan's Woodpile

You remember Paul Bunyan, right?  He had a blue Ox named Babe? Paul was a giant lumberjack...   Well, during his travels, the story goes  he visited Utah and was cutting down pine and spruce trees to keep for the winter, and he got called back to Washington (where he lived), and he never came back to get his log stash. The logs have since been petrified and are still there.  We decided to go see them!

I've had this hike on my "list" for over a year now and today was the day.  It wasn't super close, it's about an hour and 15 mins away..heading south.  It's very close the Sand Dunes, which we've never been mainly because we don't have 4-wheelers to play on.  We went through the super small town of Eureka, which in 1869 was the headquarters of the Tintic Mining District where silver and gold were mined.  It was one of the top producing mines in Utah during this time and home to the "Big 4" mines which were the largest mines at the time.  Eureka was even home to the second ever JC Penney!  

We Woodpile sits about 3 miles down a non-descript dirt road in the middle of nowhere.  The hike was short and even though all the trees were dead from a fire sometime ago, the vegetation was green and it was beautiful.

Once we got up to the actual Woodpile, it was much larger and way more interesting than we had thought, and more than pics are able to describe.  It was amazing how much it really looked like real stacks of wood!

Read this - it tells about how the "wood" formed

Our first look at the pile 

View about half way up into the large valley below, and sand dunes in the distance

Jacob was the first to explore on top

Marissa & Matt came along too!

There were smaller piles all over the place

This was a large wall of nothing but the lava rock

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There is even a small arch!

With the Woodpile explored, it was time for part 2.  I also had the "Tintic Standard Reduction Mill" on my "list" to visit and it was on the way home.  The Mill is near Goshen, Utah and was started by another mine company in the area.  They didn't want to send their ore to another smelter farther away, so they build their own smelter, and use the natural slope of the mountain to use gravity to help with the process. They connected the two locations - the mine and smelter, with a railroad, of which the rails are still visible.   

The mill was used to smelt, sift and refine ore which included silver, copper, lead and gold.  There are natural hot springs at the bottom of the mountain, and they used this water the help with the process.

The mill was built in 1919 and was only used for 5 years before being abandoned.  The reduction process they were using at the time to smelt the ore was out of date even then they started to build the mill. It was the only mill in the country to use this outdated "technology". Once the mill opened, they found out they could only process about half of the ore they were bringing to the mill, (400 ton a day) and finally decided after 5 years, the mill couldn't keep up with all the ore they were mining.  They then switched to using another mill farther away, but more efficient and left this mill idle.

It's a short 1/2 mile hike to the mill. It's all grafittied up of course, but it offers very interesting exploring!

This is a pic of the mill in operation!

And if you are so inclined, here is a 5 minute video explaining how the process works.