Heading east from Springville, the drive along US-6 (old US-50) up and over 7,477-foot Soldier Summit is truly beautiful, as the two-lane highway twists alongside pines and cottonwoods to the crest, then passes through bright red sandstone canyons along the stark eastern side of the towering Wasatch Range. The summit itself, where there’s a handy Conoco gas station-cum-general store (their motto: “Radiators Filled, Bladders Emptied”), marks the boundary between the Colorado River drainage and the Great Basin. Dropping down from Soldier Summit, US-6/191 winds along the Price River through Castlegate, a steeply walled sandstone canyon lined with working coal mines, many of which you see from the highway. While most now rely on heavy machinery to do the dirty work of digging out the coal, the Castlegate area has been the site of the two worst mining disasters in Utah history: 173 men and boys killed in a 1924 explosion, and another 200 killed at nearby Scofield on May Day, 1900.
Tiny Helper (pop. 2,025), at the downstream edge of Castlegate, six miles northwest of Price, is a classic railroad town preserved almost unchanged for nearly a century. The six-block downtown area, fronting onto the tracks, includes so many turn-of-the-20th-century brick- and stone-fronted buildings that it’s been declared a National Historic District—though the sad truth is that most of these have stood abandoned since the railroad switched to diesel power in the 1950s.
Relive the glory days at the excellent Western Mining and Railroad Museum (closed Sun.; 435/472-3009) at 296 S. Main Street, which contains enough raw material on railroading and coal mining, not to mention the region’s diverse immigrant cultures, to keep you occupied for an hour or more. There’s also a display recounting the exploits of Butch Cassidy and his gang, who raided banks and rustled cattle throughout the region in the late 1890s, hiding out in the surrounding hills. Behind the museum, an outdoor lot displays some of the giant machines used in the coal mines, which, unlike the railroad, still employ a large number of local people.
