With our townsman Green Campbell’s enviable mining success as an incentive, it has ever been my hope that I might someday also strike it rich—and mining seemed to offer the best lure. I therefore joined a group of Wetmore and Horton men in an effort to rejuvenate a gold mine at Whitepine, Colorado, twenty miles north of Sargent on the narrow gauge branch of the Denver & Rio Grande railroad. With the Wetmore group—Dr. Augustus Philip Lapham and wife Elzina Brown-Lapham; Jay Wellington Powers and wife Helen Hoyt-Powers; Charles Samuel Locknane and wife Coral Hutchison-Locknane; and Mr. C. A. Mann, the owner, backed by Scott Hopkins, Horton banker, and other moneyed men of that city, I spent a week at White pine looking things over. The mine was really six miles up the canyon from White pine—just beyond the abandoned town of Tomichi, not far from the “Top of the World.” Tomichi had been hit by a snow slide which wrecked a number of houses, killing several people. The residents, numbering about 1,000, had abandoned their homes and places of business, leaving the buildings intact—a true “Ghost Town.” Thinking in terms of the present, one might wonder why had the buildings been left to rot down? A mill had sawed the lumber on the site — and in that out-of-the-way place, the material was not worth salvaging. The tunnel of the Mann mine was about 150 feet up-slope from the wagon road on the floor of the canyon, which road was also Main Street in Tomichi. To get up to the tunnel, the trail started several hundred feet up the gulch and then swung back around a projecting ledge where the footing was rather insecure. To negotiate it the men would use the lines off the harness. The women could remain at the wagon and watch the men fall, if such might be the case. And here I pulled a boner—not my first, nor last, I frankly admit. I looked across to the “scary” ledge, and straight up to the tunnel—and then I started up on the run, the loose rock in places sliding me back almost as fast as I was gaining. However, I made the tunnel, completely exhausted. I did not sit down to rest. I fell down. And I crawled into the tunnel where there was ice—in July—and revived quickly. One of the men was hampered in that climb with a wooden leg, which afforded me ample time to recover before their arrival—but my own legs were still shaky as I eased myself around that projecting ledge, grabbing the strap now and then, while coming down. I don’t know how the first strap-holder got around without help—nor the last one, either. Mr. Mann said I had taken a great risk; that he had called to me to come back; that the exertion required to negotiate that heap of sliderock was really too much for one unaccustomed to the high altitude; that he himself—a seasoned mountain man—would not have undertaken it for the whole mine. And, you know, after I had taken one peep at the spot of interest in the tunnel, I thought, “Neither would I.”