I have an obsession with abandoned buildings, ghost towns, crumbling monuments, and the like. There is something about seeing a place that used to be full of life and now sits unused and falling apart.
Recently my husband and I went on a day trip on the motorcycle to Miami, OK. There is a motorcycle museum, Route 66 Vintage Iron, that we had been wanting to visit and we wanted to drive through Picher, OK. Picher was at one time one of the highest producing lead and zinc mines in the country. Due to the mining, huge piles of chat (the toxic crap that wasn't lead or zinc that they pulled out of the mines) were left all over the town. These chat piles caused lead poisoning and general contamination. The mining also caused the ground to be prone to caving in, making the buildings in Picher structurally unsafe. The goverment swooped in and bought out the town and most residents were evacuated.
Then a F4 tornado came through in 2008 and knocked down over 100 homes in town. Sucks to be the town of Picher, eh? Driving through Picher was eery, with houses with boarded up doors, no windows, and spray painted "keep out." There were several commercial buildings that looked brand new but had obviously been empty for years. The creepiest place we went by was an old mining museum that was grown over and omnious. Like a place one would go to get stabbed.
But this post is not about Picher, I just wanted to give a little information on it. The modern day ruins that I am speaking about is what we found a mile or so from Picher, right across the border into Kansas. In a field off the road, we see this:
Doesn't this look like some sort of Stonehenge like ruin? It was quite a ways from the road but there was a dirt road that lead to it so of course we had to go check it out. Once we got closer to it and started climbing around on it, it appeared to be old concrete bridge supports. We knew it was old because the concrete was mixed with big rocks and random stuff, which they don't do anymore around here when building bridges. There was never a road there and we think that all of this was just dumped in this field.
After this little discovery, we managed to down the motorcycle in about a foot of gross mud. I gracefully exited my seat by falling backwards into the mud and getting myself covered. We then had to spray each other down at the first car wash we found. The motorcycle is fine and we are as well and it was quite the hilarious ending to our little trip.
