Garnet Ghost Town Hotel Room

Images are from a recent road-trip to The Northwest, Northern Idaho, Southwest Alberta, and Northwestern Montana, including Waterton Park in Alberta and Glacier National Park in Montana.

Location: Garnet Ghost Town

There was a time, a hundred years ago, that Garnet was a thriving town, filled with gold miners and their families. Working hard to carve out a community in the heart of the Garnet Mountains. In 1898, somewhere around 1,000 people called Garnet their home.

If you listen closely, when the sun goes down, in Garnet, you can hear the sounds coming from Kelly’s Saloon or the Miners Union Hall that doubled as the town’s dance hall. There were dances, plays, religious services, a boxing match and union meetings in that old Miners Union Hall.

By 1905, the gold was playing out and only 150 people remained. A raging fire in 1912 and hardships on the home front during World War I sent most of the remaining miners, wives and children packing. Garnet slowly slipped into obscurity, despite a brief renewal of mining in the Great Depression of the 1930s.