Monte Cristo, the mountain gold camp

The first live mining camp on the west slope of the Cascades, Monte Cristo pulled gold and silver out of the high headwaters from 1889 to 1907, with money behind it that ran all the way to the Rockefeller name. The railroad kept washing out, the ore ran thin, and the mountains took the town back; a few buildings still stand at the end of a long trail in the Henry M. Jackson Wilderness. The ore bodies are real and so are the district records.