Haunted at Timberline Home

Another surprising feature of Iris is an almost perfectly preserved chimney mine, ladder still intact (shown below). Just two miles northwest of Iris is the site of Chance (bottom photo, below) another town that thrived around the same time and that reached a peak of about 250 residents. One of these was Anne Ellis, who wrote The Life of an Ordinary Woman and is buried in Exchequer Cemetery. A stretch of land called Mineral Hill separates Iris and Chance, and is host to several very well-preserved mining curiosities, like the arrastra shown below. The quality of the ore in this part of the Gunnison Gold Belt has always been poor, barely justifying mining it. But with gold approaching $1200/ounce (as of this writing), mining may once again be worth it in this barren but very accessible territory.