No Crowds in Comet

Barreling out of Helena that morning, I was bound for a piece of history unlike others; it was for sale to the highest bidder. The ghost town of Comet stands shrouded between the Boulder and Elkhorn mountains, forgotten by most of the world. Turning off the highway and rolling through the hamlet of Jefferson City, I continued on down a gravel road that started out smooth and then began to shift its appearance the further I went. Sagebrush and dormant yellow grasses sparsely blanketed the hills around me, and taller rocky mountains beyond that hosted pines and spruce towering into the late November air.

Soon I was passing through the historic community of Wickes, where not much remained except a lone homestead with a few newer buildings erected fairly recently. In 1867, the second-ever ore smelter in Montana was built there, but it did a poor job refining the material before it closed. Then in 1877, William W. Wickes's Montana Mining Company built an ore processing plant to find silver after the vein of the Alta mine was struck. The venture proved successful, and by 1880, the processing facilities were greatly expanded. Someone in the press even referred to it as the "Leadville of Montana," referring to the highest-elevation town in the United States located in Colorado. New refining facilities were built in nearby Corbin, MT, as well. To fuel these facilities and produce the heat required to separate metal from ore, six giant charcoal kilns were constructed in Wickes.

Wickes soon boasted over 1,500 residents, with two rail lines running into the town. It's facilities eventually processed ore from multiple mining settlements, including Comet further down Iron-Ore gulch. There were numerous saloons, two physicians, two butchers, a restaurant, and more in Wickes. However, by 1887, the smelters and facilities became overwhelmed with the increased production from mines all around, and this coincided with the railroads finally reaching town, meaning ore could be transported to elsewhere much faster. A new processing facility was built in east Helena, dealing a blow to the town, but Wickes trudged on with plenty of work remaining in the mines all around. The second decline in fortunes came with the panic of 1893, as silver prices dropped and the ore processing plants burned to the ground, causing the smelter to cease operations completely. Then horrific fires in 1900 and 1902 scorched Wickes, causing a further exodus of residents. On my way out of the town that day, a lone brick charcoal kiln still stood, the last leftover relic of the smelting boom days.

Further down the gulch, near a place known as Portal, the hillside to the southeast was home to a long abandoned rail tunnel. I stopped for awhile and explored, walking down the tunnel, feeling it get ever colder and quieter the further I went. It kept going for hundreds of yards, if not more. The cement-domed ceiling towered at least 10 feet overhead and was cracked in places with water and ice snaking its way through, expanding the fissures more and more with each passing season. Eventually turning around, I shuffled around outside near the entrance, finding trash and weather worn rusted metal parts, mattresses, and tin cans, but not much else.

After leaving Portal, the path became gnarled and rocky. Washed out ditches slashed across the road with increasing frequency, making the camper swing back and forth left and right like a giant pendulum, even as I crawled over such obstacles at a snail's pace. Then the ice came, smattered over the rough, muddy path, leftover from the melting remnants of an early-season snowstorm at the higher elevation I was climbing to. I was attempting to cross over a short pass at less than 7000' to get to Comet, and I now got out to put on my snow chains so I would have maximum traction for any grades ahead.

A couple moments later, my hopes were dashed when a couple of folks in a Toyota Tacoma came along with some information. They told me that the road got a lot rougher with no sign of it getting better with the thicker snow up there. They had nearly gotten stuck and had not even made it to the pass yet. I thanked them, and they continued on while I deliberated on what to do for a minute. With my higher center of gravity, lack of suspension travel, and given the depth of the ditches I had already seen, I decided not to chance it. Turning around, I set my direction for High Ore Road, an alternative entrance to the town based on directions given to my by the kind Tacoma folks.

A couple hours later, I was finally near Comet after a bit of a pavement jaunt. A few miles before I even got to the edge, a large mineshaft complete with a trestle and a structure known as a tipple for loading wagons with ore appeared around a bend. Pulling over, I scrambled up the hillside to the top to try to get a look down into the earthen cavern. It was a mess of cables and rusty parts jutting out from the surface of tiny, tan, packed tailings all around. Some of the timbers were still solid, a testament to the old-growth trees the pieces were carved from. Many, however, were not, so I tread carefully all around, making sure to never rely on one for support. Wandering under the tiny headframe where the cables turned vertical, I gazed down into the mineshaft, clear darkness going straight down into the earth.

I rolled on, covering the next couple miles into town in no time on the county-maintained road. As the valley opened up before my eyes, a massive structure sat on the hillside above the town with small, individually leveled cabin sites next to it visible in the afternoon sun.

The story of Comet begins in 1869, when John W. Russell staked a mining claim in the area with limited success. After a couple years, he sold it to the Alta-Montana company, partially owned by John Wickes, who expanded operations with a 40-ton concentrator to separate the ore from the rock. A rope tramway was constructed between Comet and Wickes in the early 1880's to transport concentrated ore down to the smelter there. Soon after, the railroad came in, and the town grew even more. In the 1890s, Comet was at its peak, expanding to 12 blocks and remaining open through the panic of 1893, its diverse array of ore likely playing a part. After the turn of the century, the town began to dwindle like many others as more mines closed. By the first world war, the place was a proper ghost town with only a handful of residents left.

Pulling up to what seemed like main street in front of the mill on High Ore Road, I got out and strolled over to the lone building in front of the mill. Wandering inside, I found peeling wallpaper, scattered wood, and this sturdy wooden table with massive concrete legs. I had seen windows on the exterior below the floor and found a basement entrance on the backside. Wandering in, I found a short room with stone walls and sturdy window frames. I surmised that I must be in the assayer's office, whose job it was to weigh and assess the gold coming in from the mines; they would've had an assortment of measuring equipment on the table above available for their task before they'd store it in the protection of the cellar below.

Wandering back into the sun, I continued on uptown towards a slanting two-story structure nearby across the road, the largest in town. With just a handful of scrubby bare trees and sparse bunches of grass around it, the old boarding house had seen better days. Light was visible through the roof, and many timbers had collapsed and rotted away. I wanted to go in and explore the room to see if any clues still remained as to the travelers who passed through, but it looks as if the place could tumble inwards on itself at anytime. The front door was gone, and a shadowy staircase led up to the second story in the middle, beckoning one to explore. I quickly decided I was not about to get buried alive by chancing a quick look.

Around the corner was an old clapboard house with fine siding and a large inviting front porch, even with the whole structure a little off-kilter. Going inside, I found the porch sturdy and the inside in drier condition than I expected based on the holes in the roof. There was crumbling carpet beneath my feet and paint chips galore all over the floor, along with splinters of wood and shards of glass. On the wall was an old water heater, riveted together with sturdy lead pipes running to it, likely pre-war if not earlier. The kitchen contained some cabinets that had seen better days, as well as a sink and broken bulbs overhead, showing the house was somewhat modern.

Stepping back outside, I gazed around at further dark shapes on the hillsides. There were a lot of buildings smattered about the town, most all of them in serious states of disrepair since the town had never been restored. In 1926, after the war, Comet saw a revival in its fortunes when the Basin Montana Tunnel Company came to the town and decided to reopen the mines. They invested in a new ore processor five times the size of the one built a few decades prior and got to work. At the time, the new mill was said to be "the most modern in Montana" and was second only to the facilities in Butte. Over the next 15 years until World War II, the mine would produce over $20 million of lead, zinc, copper, silver, and gold.

There were so many buildings still around in one form or another because Comet is a younger ghost town than most on account of that depression-era revival. Many other ghost towns died out in the early twentieth century and experienced fires that took much of their architectural history. In Comet, folks had moved in only a few decades after many buildings had been abandoned, and they repaired them and fixed them up to restart the town. The thought of those days when the town began chattering with life again makes me wonder. Did whole families move back, dust off the cobwebs, and make their new cozy homes out of the same places others had forty years prior? I'm sure the few folks who had the gumption to stick it out for those couple decades of quiet were thrilled, seeing new faces and energy back in the place they loved and called home.

Since many buildings had been repaired while they were still in decent condition in the 20's and 30's, plenty still stood today without any intervention. It was a seldom-seen example of resilience—that place and those leftovers of countless lives and memories, out there facing harsh blizzards and relentless wind yet only yielding a bit with each passing year.

Comet was chaos, with many of the roads long since grown over with grass and sagebrush. I explored in no particular order and kept going back and forth to structures that seemed to have some character. One such place was a flat-faced structure in the process of being pulled down to earth. It was entrenched in the hillside, and it had two double doors with large spaces making up most of their middle. If those windows ever held glass panes in such a space, they would've been magnificent, however unlikely that may be. I entered through the doors and found myself in an old garage. Ancient oil cans poked out of the earth, and big beams ran overhead, supporting the long roof. The place had likely been converted from a blacksmith or wagonwright shop to one used for repairing the early automobiles and mine trucks that operated around Comet upon its reopening.

Moving onto another home, I glanced inside and saw peeling light green paint on its baseboard walls. A small brick chimney extended down a couple feet from the ceiling with a bent, rusty stovepipe coming out down towards the ground. Shelves were in the corner, and the floor was again covered in various withering debris. Through a doorway in the back of the front room, I could see an old upholstered chair with its stuffing torn out and the seat mangled, with the sun shining upon it through a broken window ahead. It seemed to me like a special character posed in the center of my view and made me briefly wonder if I'd always end up in that town, in that spot to see that chair in the beam of light for some reason. It was a peaceful sight poised in the past.

Stepping from the front room into another doorway at the side, I saw a patch of darkness in my vision below and immediately looked down. The cellar entrance stared up at me, with its stairs leading down into the depths. I decided to steer clear of descending into the earth all together that day, even if these stairs had looked a bit sturdier than the last.

Moving on from that home, I wandered back down towards the far end of High Ore Road now to see what lay on the fringes of town. There I found in the yard an old Model T truck of some sort, fairly complete all things considered, with parts of the engine, gearbox, and rear differential present. I looked it over for a few minutes, trying to discern the major things they did differently back then compared to the American truck platforms of today. Some designs are just larger versions of the same things they used, like differentials and manual transmissions, but other things, like the engines, are complete different animals all together, of course. Behind the truck was a curious structure with a wide roof all around, likely keeping the porch conveniently clear of most snow in the wintertime to this day.

The sides of the structure were made of logs packed with mud and concrete in between. The place was long, 20–30 feet, and had multiple windows on its sides, along with a side room fused into the rock of the hill and concrete that had been added with a flume for a stove. It appeared as if someone might've lived in that place more recently than the 1940's, the concrete was barely chipped or cracked.The place was surely abandoned now, though, with more of the same kind of debris inside as the rest.

After that, I turned back towards the mill, staring at the building and its many windows. There was a barbed wire fence strung across behind the Assayer's building that blocked access to the mill and the bunkhouse for the workers. I wanted to go in and explore, but figured it was probably roped off because it was a tangled mess in there like all the other structures, just with multiple stories and overhead walkways. The machinery in there made me wonder most though: the old iron processing machines and rollers that pulverized the ore had to be massive. I was a bit disappointed to not be able to see inside.

On one of the leaning buildings remaining near the front of town was a for sale sign with "Comet, MT, 68 Acres" on it. It made me wonder who owned the place now and when they had purchased it. Had they bought it to preserve or for some other reason? And would the next person protect it like they had? Hopefully Comet will be around for generations ahead to explore and get a glimpse at what those American pioneers endured to make it out here in the wilds of Montana.

Sources:

Partners, P. B. O. (2017, October 4). The Glory Days of Comet, Montana. Explore Big Sky. https://www.explorebigsky.com/the-glory-days-of-comet-montana/22805

Walton, A. (n.d.). Wickes Montana. Western Mining History. https://westernmininghistory.com/towns/montana/wickes/