Sunset unlimited.
In the West of 1898, one gold rush died while another blazed. In Nevada, the last of the Comstock mines shut down, Comstock ore having built mansions and bought Senate seats from Nob Hill to Washington, D.C. In Seattle, word of a new strike along the Yukon lured boatloads of...

The Gold Country's historic hotels: a guide to 11 of the most enduring places to rest your head in California's Mother Lode.
A guide to 11 of the most enduring places to rest your head in California's Mother Lode Back in the 1850s and '60s, when the mines in California's Gold Country were booming and rough camps with names like Hang-town aspired to a veneer of culture, the opening of a...

The new boom in Central City.
Casinos have ushered in a new era for this Colorado mining town, but the old is still as good as gold In the spring of 1859, gold strikes along Gregory Gulch fueled the first big rash to Colorado and the growth of the Rocky Mountain town that became Central...

The town that came back from the dead.
The devastation caused by Britain's nation-wide programme of pit closures and privatisation hit mining communities in South Wales particularly hard. But, as Cathy Savage discovered, the men of aberdare are fighting back Tyrone O'Sullivan, miner and part owner of Tower Colliery near Aberdare, gazes out of the canteen...

Denver Show 2000.
It seemed an unusually busy show this year, in part because of the rushes, thrills and general buzzing conniptions surrounding a few very new, very spectacular mineral finds. It must be said that general attendance, both at the hotel and Main shows, was somewhat off from that of past...

MINING THE SACRED MOUNTAINS.
To the Navajo, the extinct volcano marking the western pillar of their sprawling reservation is called Diichiti, the Mountain of Strength. It is sacred ground to the Navajo, Havasupi and Hopi tribes. But these San Francisco Peaks are also home to the White Vulcan Pumice Mine, a...

Western Wanderings.
OUR MAN IN BUTTE Erin go Butte * The parade assembles along Broadway: the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the pipe and drum corps, the Irish dancers whose breath steams in the cold air. In Butte, Montana, winter does not release its grip by March, not...

Telluride.
As you climb the stairs of the abandoned boardinghouse, the weathered wood creaking under your feet and the mountain wind whistling through cracks in the walls, you understand why Alta, Colorado, is called a ghost town. Walk into the tiny rooms, barren now except for the litter of passing hikers,...

Beginnings and Endings.
Bertrand Tavernier is the most enterprising, various, humane, and sensitive filmmaker in France today-or, more simply put, the finest. Starting with The Clockmaker, the now-59-year-old director has turned out every kind of film. Some may remember him best for the thriller The Judge and the Assassin, others for the...

Scargilll's great gamble.
DAY AFTER DAY, week after week, massed pickets and massed police have faced each other and tried to outmaneuver each other: and miners have fought miners, strikers against non-strikers, fists, bricks, bottles, and insults flying. The siege of the Libyan "People's Bureau" was more dramatic, Mrs. Thatcher's constant wrangling...