Brian's Ghost Town Safari #2: Monte Cristo

Although I’ve always loved a picturesque ruin, Monte Cristo was my very first ghost town. This time last year I was living in Seattle, understandably bored; when I heard about an abandoned gold mining camp in the mountains nearby, I knew I had to take a look.

Fig. 5.1: Metal-sided garage, the oldest surviving building in Monte Cristo.

Western Washington isn’t usually associated with gold mining. You might expect a ruined prospectors’ settlement in the Sierra Nevada or the wilds of the Yukon, but not just outside the Puget Sound megalopolis – everyone knows that business around there is all trees and tech. But for a brief moment in the late nineteenth century, the desperate and credulous flooded up the South Fork Sauk River to stake their claims on a supposed fortune in gold. Unfortunately for them, it didn’t quite pan out. Pun intended.

Monte Cristo, Snohomish County, WA
est. 1893, abandoned 1980

Gold and silver were struck at the headwaters of the South Fork Sauk in 1889. At this point, though, the area was just too rugged and remote to exploit without some serious investment. The goldfields lay fifty miles east of the port at Everett, and the men who found them had to go cap in hand to East Coast industrialists in order to secure funding for a railroad. John D. Rockefeller – the Standard Oil monopolist who was at this point reaching his apogee as the richest human being in history – was one of those who lent out his capital. The tycoon’s name was magnetic and once it emerged that he was funding the project, thousands of people began trooping up the Sauk to file their own claims, sure that Rockefeller couldn’t pick a bad bet.

The Eastern investors and lone prospectors alike dug their mines high in the mountain peaks, and cable cars were built to lower the ore into the valley below for processing. A village soon sprung up around the mills and concentrator at the headwaters of the Sauk. Monte Cristo was a typically seedy boomtown full of grifters eager to “mine the miners.” The venality, violence, drunkenness and sexual exploitation were probably as bad as what you see today in the fracking camps of Canada and the Dakotas; it’s what happens when there are lots of single men making money very quickly in isolated surroundings. The only difference was Monte Cristo’s literary pretension. The main drag was Dumas Street, and the intersecting avenues had names like Mercedes and Dantes.

Fig. 5.2: Monte Cristo in 1895, looking like a big snowy logjam.

The most famous of Monte Cristo’s crooked merchants was one Frederick Trump, a Bavarian immigrant who had fled to America to evade the draft. In the 1890s, he was living in Seattle, where he ran a combined diner, saloon, boardinghouse and brothel called the Dairy Restaurant. When he heard about the strike on the Sauk, he figured astutely that the only people who usually get rich out of a gold rush are the outfitters and pimps. (This is a lesson I had hammered into me again and again living in Seattle, which first really prospered as a metropolis by fleecing would-be prospectors heading to the Yukon.) Moving to Monte Cristo, Trump jumped somebody else’s claim and built a “hotel” (read: brothel) on his squatted property. Despite being an obvious crook, he became the town’s most prominent citizen, and he was soon elected justice of the peace. If the story sounds familiar, it’s because his grandson Donald managed a similar trick on a grander scale a century later.

Fig. 5.3: Frederick Trump, patriarch and pimp.

Life in Monte Cristo was never pleasant and it soon grew worse. Rockefeller took greater and greater control of the town, elbowing out the other investors and cracking down on labor agitation. The heavy annual rain- and snowfalls destroyed rail lines and buildings every winter, making the mere survival of the town Sisyphean. Worst of all, after only a few years it became clear that the gold deposits were much more meager than initially thought – not to mention heavily leavened with naturally occurring arsenic.

By the turn of the 20^th century, many of the town’s residents, including Frederick Trump, had abandoned ship. (Trump went on to repeat his Monte Cristo business model during the Yukon gold rush. He became a wealthy man and moved to New York to start a family. The rest is, unfortunately, history.) In 1903, Rockefeller and his underlings sold the entire mining operation to the American Smelting and Refining Company. ASARCO, the source of the Guggenheim family fortune, is now primarily known as one of America’s worst industrial polluters; fully twenty of its former properties are now Superfund sites and it has been held liable for negligently poisoning dozens of communities across North America with lead and arsenic emissions. As I’m sure you’ve noticed so far, this is an extremely Gilded Age story.

The only part of the Monte Cristo operation the Guggenheims really wanted was the smelter at the end of the railroad line in Everett. (It’s now one of their twenty Superfund sites.) The town was surplus, and was treated as such. Monte Cristo dwindled to a ruin. In 1920, the last operating mine was buried by a massive avalanche.

However, the end of one industry was the birth of another. With its beautiful mountain setting and backdrop of romantic ruins, Monte Cristo became a resort attraction almost immediately, and remained so for much of the twentieth century. The hotel was renovated and opened for motorists touring the newly built Mountain Loop Highway. Visitors could stay in cabins and enjoy the area's hiking trails; the town is adjacent to the Gothic Basin, which is supposed to be spectacular. Its remoteness and the yearly weather damage, however, soon took its toll. By 1980 the resort had deteriorated into a shabby mess at the end of a long, poorly maintained track; that year, a heavy flood of the South Fork Sauk washed out the road link completely and the county refused to rebuild it, effectively terminating Monte Cristo as a habitable community. Three years later, the abandoned lodge burned to the ground. Looters and treasure hunters ripped up most of what was left.

Fig. 5.4: Vacation cabins and mining debris at Monte Cristo today.

Through the efforts of concerned locals and the Trust for Public Lands, the townsite was eventually transferred to federal ownership. The US Forest Service became the official custodians of the surviving vacation cabins, thousands of pounds of ruined mining equipment, and several mines and their associated piles of arsenic-contaminated tailings. A few houses on the edge of town, however, remained in private hands. The site is now being actively preserved through a public-private volunteer partnership.

My friend and I visited on a mild, overcast day in early June. We parked at the Gothic Basin Trailhead and attempted to find the trail to town. Unfortunately, there have been so many separate roads built through the valley, and the course of the South Fork Sauk has changed so many times, that we ended up just walking up the stony riverbed most of the way. As we hiked the four miles in, we spotted the washed-out county bridges – now sitting useless in the middle of the river – and began to see scraps of the old mining railroad exposed among the rocks.

Fig. 5.5: A path.

A little later, we passed a denuded hillside above the river. A sign identified it as “The Repository.” The Forest Service had finally buried the last of the poisonous mine tailings under this slope in 2015. The decontamination project had required waiving laws in order to construct a heavy trucking road through the Henry M. Jackson Wilderness, which surrounds the Monte Cristo townsite. Building a necessary road in a necessarily roadless area is a classic example of the contradictions sometimes inherent in caring for our environment and fixing humanity’s mistakes. Once, while working on a trail crew, I was asked to fell an enormous old-growth tree – an organism probably 300 years old. We were using it to build a series of puncheon bridges on an impassably boggy section of wilderness trail. Normally, I’d see cutting old-growth in this day and age as blasphemous and disgusting. But there was no way to pack construction materials for the bridges into the backcountry, and if we hadn’t built the bridges hikers and equestrians would have fanned out across the area to evade the bog, creating desire paths, trampling vegetation, and causing erosion. Did we do the right thing? These are the kind of difficult calls land management professionals have to make daily. (I’ll have to talk more about the experience of felling a tree in a later post.)

As we got to the four-mile mark, we were surprised to find a modern house, complete with satellite dish and a truck outside! A sign explained that there were still a few private “donut hole” inholdings on the edge of town, and reminded us to keep to USFS property. It seems absolutely inconceivable that someone could live there. I don’t know how you could get even a robust 4WD truck up the riverbed, but I guess if you had a house here before it became inaccessible, there wouldn’t be any way to make a profit by selling it, so you might as well keep it as an off-grid vacation property.

The ghost town proper started a little further on. Someone had set out the old lodge sign as a welcoming signpost. After passing it, mine carts and other bits of debris started appearing in the underbrush. The vacation cabins, of which there are maybe a dozen or so, began in a clearing, alongside an enormous (and still functioning!) railroad turntable.

Fig. 5.6: We didn't touch it, but when we passed by on our way out some young kids were spinning it around, without even a rusty squeak.

The foundations of the burnt-out lodge were a little further back into the woods. There was no trace of the concentrator, Trump’s brothel, or most of the other 19th-century buildings. Only one structure from the gold camp era, the garage pictured above, is still standing. Walking up to the trail signposted “Dumas Street” you can see why. There are some plaques denoting where major structures used to be, and in a lot of cases there's nothing behind the sign but a sheer drop. The destructive power of nature is palpable all throughout the valley. I’m sure if I visited again in twenty years, the landslides and floods would have made the landscape visibly different.

Monte Cristo is a pretty standard example of my vague ghost town hypothesis: communities created by the profit motive in defiance of environmental conditions are not sustainable in the long run. But on the other hand, in terms of its unusually intact buildings and its wealth of well-preserved artifacts, it’s an exceptional standout and well worth a visit.