You can see how close the fire came. They seem to have stopped it from coming to the Golden Crest, even though everything is gone anyway.
JEFF'S GALENA ADVENTURES, JUNE 7, 2006
Today I went to the Golden Crest mine ruins and took a few photos. There are NO buildings left. I remember when I was a kid all the buildings were there, and lots of things were in the buildings, including a big safe.
You can see how close the fire came. They seem to have stopped it from coming
to the Golden Crest, even though everything is gone anyway.
Panorama of refining building ruins here
I then continued down the road that goes down the valley. It connects after some terrible road to Two Bit Road, which connects to Boulder Canyon highway just a couple of miles from Deadwood. I had to get a torch for the water treatment test anyway, so I went into town and bought that (and visited Taco John's), then came back onto Two Bit Road (44,22.968 103,41.420), then decided to follow it past where the Golden Crest turnoff is. It turns into a bunch of "Two Bit..." named roads. I followed Two Bit Springs Road up the hill. It turned into Two Bit Springs Loop, which seemed to just loop past a home and back into a future development. But there was a logging road that turned off and up to the right, so I took that. It connected to a nicer road, and I took that to the left, toward Galena. It turned into Reif Lane at 44,19.445, 103,42.001. This then connects pretty soon to the very top of Strawberry Hill, with the street sign there of "Upper Two Bit Road." Whatever. At any rate, that's a way to get into Deadwood from Galena, although roundabout. I was going to mark the GPS coordinate of the Golden Crest turnoff, but I never got back there, so I probably will later. So, from the top of Strawberry Hill, you'd turn onto Upper Two Bit Road, then take a left where the Reif Lane sign is (it will say "dead end"). Keep going to the first right (I think it is, past a home), then down to the "Two Bit..." roads, and keep going downhill to Boulder Canyon.
This morning I gently tipped over the outhouse, since it appeared that some of the bottom boards were rotted. Before anybody started actually using it I figured since I'm going into town to rent a pickup, I may as well see what boards are needed to fix up the outhouse. I'm digging the hole much deeper than the fire guys did when they put the outhouse there after the fire. It was nice of them to put the outhouse back up, but it just wasn't a very good job.
