Lion City and Hecla Mines - A Montana Ghost Town - near Melrose, Montana MT

Lion City and Hecla Mines - A Montana Ghost Town - near Melrose, Montana MT

Join us for a 15 mile journey starting at Melrose, traveling west through Glendale and working our way up Trapper Creek drainage to Lion City and Hecla Mines located 9,000 feet above sea-level.

The road was a bit rough in some places and excellent in others. A high clearance vehicle or an ATV is recommended. No cars, motorhomes or tow trailers should attempt this road.

This was my first visit to Lion City. A few years ago I captured the ghost town of Glendale (with the smelter chimney stack) https://youtu.be/uUFBsN7JWvs and the charcoal kilns (in the next drainage) https://youtu.be/SEig14IpEds with my first drone.

We couldn’t have asked for a better day! The weather was grand but we had some wind (the drone could care less)! We had six cameras taking stills and video. I could have made this video over two hours long but then again, who would want to watch it? My goal was to produce a 7 minute video but I could only compress it down to 14 minutes to tell my story.

The Hecla Mines on Lion Mountain are amazing. You can see adits (openings to horizontal mines) to 20 miles of underground tunnels. Miners had to climb stairs to enter these openings in order to go to work extracting ore that contained silver, lead and copper. The ore was transported to the stamp mill four miles away by overhead cable cars and then transported to Glendale for smelting. All the trees you see have grown since the 1890’s since all timber was stripped from the hills to feed the smelters blast furnaces.

Silver mining came to a virtual standstill with the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893. Sporadic mining occurred until 1922.

This sequence was captured with a GoPro Hero5 Session (front view), Mobius action cam (inside view), DJI Phantom 3 Advanced (aerial views), Canon Vixia HFS100 (cabin views), Panasonic camera (mine views) and a Samsung Galaxy 5 (miscellaneous views). Editing was completed with Adobe Premier.

Many thanks to Peter, my friend from Austria and his dog Emily for the entertainment and most of the still images used in this production.

Music used: "Aretes", "Gnarled Situation", "Gymnopedie No. 1"and "Virtutes Instrumenti" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Видео Lion City and Hecla Mines - A Montana Ghost Town - near Melrose, Montana MT канала davidegg22