Haunted at Timberline Home

Iris, like the more successful mining town of Vulcan, is located in what was once called the Gunnison Gold Belt. As you can see in the virtual tour, there's not much left. However, the structures and mining ruins that do remain are, oddly, located almost exactly on the four corners (north, south, east, west) of the townsite. The vast center, once dense with buildings and populated by more than 1000 people, is empty, flat and barren. Iris was named after a child, one of the town's first residents. Another surprising feature of Iris is an almost perfectly preserved chimney mine, ladder still intact. See below.

Just two miles northwest of Iris is the site of Chance (bottom photo, below, and virtual tour), 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 $800/ounce (as of this writing), mining may once again be worth it in this barren but very accessible territory.