Submitted by John Fleckenstein

Trinity is not really a ghost town. There has been continual habitation there since the 1920s. Ore was discovered there in the late 1800s and only some mining was done until Royal Development Company in the 1920s came in. The ore is in a Breccia pipe similar to (and only nine miles from Holden). There are two or three more similar pipes between Trinity and Holden. Shortly after driving a two mile haulage addit (all electric) from near the mill to the ore body the word came from town to shut down, leave a maintenance crew and get out (very similar to Holden). The maintenance crew stayed until the late 1930s. Sometime around WWII all the equipment was auctioned and removed, leaving only the hydroelectric power plant and associated infrastructure. In the 1950s a man who tried to operate it as a summer camp purchased the property. There was some surface exploration in the 1960s by Texas Gulf Western. It was purchased again by a local logging-construction company in the 1970s and again in the 1990s by a private concern.

There are many interesting personal stories about this remote area. For instance; John, a miner working for Royal Development wanted to go home for Christmas. It was twenty-five miles to a plowed road in the winter. John was a skier and worked the two to midnight shift on Christmas Eve. When he came out of the dry it was snowing. He found an empty tomato can and cut the bottom out of it and put it on his carbide lamp as a wind shield. He took his pack and started skiing toward town. It was a cold snow and increasing in intensity. John thought "it's only a few miles to the Maple Creek cabin, I can stop there if it gets to bad." After crossing two avalanches, John got to the cabin in thigh deep snow (even on skies). John thought "it's only six more miles to Rock Creek, I'll stop there." Pushing on to Rock Creek the blizzard continued. When he arrived there the snow was over his knees, he thought "it's almost daylight now, I might as well go on to Chickamin Creek cabin." It continued to snow hard, at daylight he thought, "well I might as well go on home now." John arrived at the Chiwawa Road cabin in the late afternoon eighteen hours after he started, but made it home for Christmas.

John continued to work at the mine until it shut down in the late 1930s, even after that he and his son Ray continued to operate a trap line near Trinity until the 1950s. Remnants of their cabin remain