Announcer: Idaho Experience is made possible with funding from the James and Barbara Cimino Foundation, devoted to preserving the spirit of Idaho.

From Anne Voillequé and Louise Nelson.

From Judy and Steve Meyer.

With additional support from the J.A.

and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, the Friends of Idaho Public Television, the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[Names being read] NARRATOR: Ninety-one names.

Ninety-one miners killed.

Ninety-one grieving families.

Every year, on May 2, the Silver Valley remembers.

People gather at the memorial along Interstate 90, just down the road from the Sunshine Mine, where smoke and gas from a fire burning in a mine tunnel 3,400 feet below ground turned deadly on May 2, 1972.

MEMORIAL Speaker: I don't remember my dad's voice.

He tucked me into bed with my mom, he left, and I never saw him again.

NARRATOR: In 2022, on the 50th anniversary of the fire, the service was bigger, with more decorations, more dignitaries and more attendees.

[Governor Little speaking] Narrator: But just as in years past, the names were read.

Prayers were prayed.

And one by one, headlamps went dark.

[Voice reading names] Peggy White, Community Leader: We have the 91 helmets up there and the lights are turned off every year, so people get the perspective of how many lives were really lost that day.

MEMORIAL Speaker: My mom was pregnant with me, so I never got to meet my dad.

MEMORIAL Speaker: It was tough.

I was 8 years old, trying to survive without a dad.

NARRATOR: When the crowds go home, the remembering goes on.

Katherine Aiken, Idaho Historian: That Sunshine Mine memorial, it's lit up at night.

Every time you drive in the Silver Valley, you see that mining statue standing there and think about those people.

There are very few folks who didn't have some relative or some relationship, and even if you didn't, if you're a miner or miner's family, it's a constant reminder of the dangers of underground work.

NARRATOR: Peggy White lost her father, her uncle and her brother-in-law in the fire.

She's become one of the leaders in maintaining the memorial and the memories.

White: I do it for the families because there wasn't just one family.

And that's what I always have to remember.

Wasn't just my family.

It was 91 and their hearts are just as broken as what mine was, and my mom's.

White: My nephew was a year old at the time, didn't even get to know his dad.

People need to know that they were men with lives.

I don't want them just to be a name on the wall.

I want them to know that they were men with wives and children, and that's the biggest thing to me.

NARRATOR: Matt Beehner lost his father in the fire.

But he knows the suffering extended far beyond the families of the 91 miners.

MATT Beehner, LOST HIS FATHER IN FIRE: The guys that lived through that fire, some of them, I think, were all right, but there were a bunch of them that it affected them the rest of their lives, which would have affected their families.

It changed them.

I feel bad for those guys.

I mean, there's no memorial for them.

But I know how bad it affected them and I know other people know how bad it affected them, too.

NARRATOR: Don Capparelli traded shifts with another miner, and wasn't in the mine the day of the fire.

But he volunteered on the team that retrieved bodies.

Today, he and others are working with schools to make sure that a new generation of Silver Valley residents knows that history.

[Conversation about photographs] Don CappArelli, retired miner: It's hard for young kids to understand.

That loss in 1972 was so great to so many people.

And that's what we're trying to make the kids understand, it's part of the history here.

It's that loss we're dealing with.

It's that loss.

[Music] Aiken: They call Idaho the Gem State.

There's a reason for that.

It's because mining is so crucial, and especially the Silver Valley, where population came and was at the center of making Idaho eligible for statehood and bringing enough people in.

That, coupled with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints coming in the southern part of Idaho, gave sufficient population for territorial status and then state status.

NARRATOR: Gold brought miners to Idaho in the 1860s.

According to legend, Noah Kellogg was prospecting in 1885 when he found his lost donkey on what became the Bunker Hill lode.

When the first ski resort opened in 1967, the Jackass Ski Bowl honored Kellogg's fabled founding donkey.

Aiken: The Silver Valley is one of the most important mining areas, not just because of the amount of production, but also the quality of the ore and how long it has existed as a mining region.

Tom Henderson, General Manager, Sunshine Mine: The Silver Belt tends to be more constrained to a region within the Silver Valley that historically has had higher silver production as measured like ounces per ton.

Bunker Hill is not part of the Silver Belt.

Bunker Hill is principally a zinc mine with some lead and some silver.

The real the real major mines, the producers on the Silver Belt were the Sunshine, the Galena, the Coeur.

They're higher silver.

Very unique to the district.

NARRATOR: The Silver Valley was born donkey stubborn, and it's remained that way, wary of outsiders, environmentalists and regulators, protective of the rough-and-tumble way of life.

Folks talk fondly of the Silver Valley's reputation for working hard, playing hard and - until the 1980s - winking at the bordellos in Wallace.

Mac Pooler, Kellogg mayor: A mining community is a tough community.

They make a lot of money.

They spend a lot of money.

They don't like each other much.

They fight with the loggers.

It was a tough area, but it was a fair area.

If you had an enemy, you had an enemy.

If you had a friend, you had a friend.

NARRATOR: Gold, silver, lead and zinc built Idaho, and the Silver Valley, with its 100 mines, became one of the richest mining districts in the world.

Aiken: They paid very well.

After union activity, they provided excellent benefits in terms of health insurance.

Silver Mountain was a company-owned ski resort built to attract managers to the Silver Valley.

So it wasn't just the jobs themselves.

It's the entire community.

The Kellogg YMCA was built by the Bunker Hill Company as a way to encourage workers to have recreation.

Lots of parks, especially ballparks, were built by mining companies.

So they were central to everything.

NARRATOR: The Sunshine Mine claims date to the 1880s.

By 1937, Sunshine was the nation's top producer of silver - yielding even more than Nevada's famous Comstock Lode.

Over its lifetime, more than 360 million ounces of silver came out of the Sunshine Mine.

Every ounce dug, blasted or drilled by a miner.

BRIAN HIGDEM, MAINTENANCE ELECTRICAL MANAGER, SUNSHINE MINE: It's something that you enjoy doing.

It's good money.

But it's really, really hard work.

So working down there is an adventure for sure.

It's getting dirty and muddy and sweaty and grimy is a part of the job.

Some areas, the deeper you go, the wetter it gets, the hotter it gets.

It's a rough and tough job.

It's not for everyone.

You're going to work in a subterranean environment, the deepest of deepest.

Aiken: I think most people don't realize how complex that underground world is and how far down they are and how you're going from one tunnel to the next.

It's just like this kind of honeycomb of connected tunnels.

NARRATOR: The Sunshine Mine is more than a mile deep, with dozens of working levels and miles and miles of tunnels that radiate from central shafts.

With rail cars, shops and stations where employees wait, eat and work, it was a small underground city.

And with explosives and welding torches and heavy electrical equipment, smoke from small fires was not uncommon.

Ron Flory, Sunshine miner: They really didn't think that there's any chance of there being a bad fire in a hard rock mine.

I mean, you think hard rock.

Rock won't burn.

But the fire was in an old worked-out area of the mine, where in the early years they used nothing but timber and never really thought about the timber burning.

Rock, what can burn, you know?

[Sounds from press conference] NARRATOR: No one knows how the 1972 fire started.

It burned into old timbers and into polyurethane insulation, sprayed on to keep a bulkhead air tight.

Toxic gases spread through the mine's air shafts.

Heavy smoke made it hard for miners to see, and invisible carbon monoxide made it deadly.

Flory: They found out later that the smoke had blown a bulkhead in the fresh-air intakes.

So when they left the fans on, they were in reality pushing the smoke throughout the mine.

NARRATOR: 173 men went into the Sunshine Mine for the dayshift on May 2, 1972.

Why did fewer than half of them come out alive?

The causes were numerous.

All the bosses were out of town for a company meeting, so evacuation decisions got delayed.

Communication inside the mine was spotty.

The system for tracking miners inside was unreliable.

When the operator of the 10 Shaft hoist died, miners were denied a primary escape route.

Miners didn't carry respirators and many of the units that were in the mine were old or rusted.

These "self-rescuers" became painfully hot when used correctly - but miners didn't know that because most weren't trained.

These safety failings were not unique to Sunshine.

Safety video announcer: In 1972, there were no regulations for hard rock mines that required miners to either wear self-rescuers to protect themselves against carbon monoxide or be trained in how to use them.

The Sunshine was one of the few mines in the area to even provide them, but they were stored at the shaft stations on different levels of the mine.

They were kept in cabinets near the first aid stations, not with the miners themselves.

As the men gathered at the stations, they were already having trouble breathing because of the smoke.

TERRY JEROME, mine foreman in 1972: There was no panic.

No, everybody was calm.

That's half the reason I think half of them died.

Nobody was worried.

Everybody knew everything would be fine because a hard rock mine does not burn.

NARRATOR: When rescuers did arrive later that day, they found men who had fallen where they stood, waiting for hoists that never came.

NARRATOR: In the hours after the fire, families began gathering at the mine, scenes captured in iconic newspaper and TV images.

But the true scale of what had happened wouldn't be known for days.

NARRATOR: Don Capparelli volunteered for the rescue crew, which became a grisly body-recovery detail that lasted 11 days.

CappArelli: The hard part for me was when they found there was nobody alive no more.

We come up out of the mine, but then you had to walk out and to go up in the dry.

The families were there.

And it was like, I just I just put my head down, because I just, I just seen your dad or your husband.

They're waiting, they're waiting there to see if they're alive.

Yeah, I knew.

I put him in the bag, you know?

I mean, he's gone, but I can't, I can't even face these people.

The best thing for me to do was, I just went around and I tried to scurry up the stairs so I didn't have to talk to anybody.

You know, you knew their loved ones were gone.

Yeah.

You know, all this is taking place, remember, I'm 23 years old.

I'm not very old.

You know, I'm still I'm still just a kid, you know?

Yeah.

NARRATOR: The death toll would have been worse had it not been for extraordinary heroism exhibited by many of the miners, starting with the shift bosses.

JEROME: The shifters didn't leave at that time because they still had crews down there.

They took responsibility for the whole crews.

And they weren't, they wouldn't leave until their last man was out.

So they remained, tried to help, tried to direct people.

And they didn't make it.

There was, I believe, there was a lot of heroes in that fire.

Beehner: A guy by the name of Bob Scanlan, he lived up the road here.

Bob with a relief hoistman at 10 Shaft.

The hoistman had bad lungs and he started getting affected by the CO.

So Bob told him, he said, I can run it.

Just go ahead and leave and I'll run it.

And Bob stayed on that hoist.

And he was shaking.

The CO was overtaking him.

He had to have known he was going to die.

But he died right there in the chair.

He did not stop, until he died.

It's just, it's amazing some of the stories, the heroism like Bob.

VOICE OF ANNOUNCER: Greg Dionne, a 23-year-old pipe fitter was working that day.

He was trained as a cager and when the skip finally arrived, he was on it.

JEROME: Greg came down and the smoke was so thick you couldn't see, and he had these self-rescuers.

They look like a tuna fish can that has a little knob in the center that you pushed it and it broke the seal so you could breathe through it.

Well, he handed them out to everybody and said, "Push that little knob and stick 'em on and don't take 'em off.

They will get hot."

So we stood by the shaft, and he said "OK, the skip's here."

And he started pushing guys out in the shaft.

It was so smoky, I wasn't so sure the skip was there.

I was glad when I stepped out that my feet hit something.

But he packed us in there as tight as he could.

There was no gates on it.

This was the double-drum skip.

"You ready?"

And I'm "Yup."

And we went up.

He went to the 5,000 level, got a few people off the 5,000 level, sent them up, and Greg Dionne did not make it out.

JIM LAMPHERE, miner in 1972: I didn't have a self-rescuer.

They had some old ones in a locker they were beating on with pipe wrenches trying to get them to work.

Don Beehner, I give him credit for saving my life, had a self-rescuer with a mouthpiece on it, and he took it out of his mouth and put it in mine until I got to where I can breathe again.

NARRATOR: Don Beehner had already made it to safety when he volunteered to go back in with the first rescue crew.

Each member carried his own oxygen supply.

The breathing apparatus was heavy and cumbersome.

Beehner died when he took his mask off to share his oxygen with a struggling miner.

MATT BEEHNER: No, my dad, he didn't get out.

My dad was still on the station and he was trained in mine rescue, and he volunteered to go back.

They got back there into the smoke and the CO was deadly high.

And ran into a guy that was coming out and he had a lot of CO in him.

And I'm sure my dad did too, coming up, I think, that's probably why he made the decisions he did.

And my dad took his mask off, put it over the guy's face told him to breathe it.

The guy took a breath.

My dad put it back on his face, took a breath, put it back on Schultz's face.

And then he fell over.

That was it.

It is some comfort.

I wish he would've did something different, but you can't change what happened.

NARRATOR: Peggy White's dad, Gene Johnson, was a shaft foreman who could have walked to safety.

CappArelli: Her dad was out in fresh air.

He wasn't out of the mine, but all you got to do is walk out that door down there and go out.

Pretty simple.

That's the opportunity Gene Johnson had.

But he stayed there to make sure the other people went down the right hall.

He gave his life to save all them people.

White: That's another comfort of mine, is God's in control.

So the ones that lived, I'm glad they lived.

And the ones that got a lot of the other guys out, bless all their hearts for doing it.

That is something that you can hang on to.

My mom never got over it.

She died in the fire too, part of her.

Never, never got over it.

They had a love between one another that a lot of people don't understand.

She just really loved my Dad, and he was good to her, and the best.

My dad, six foot, my mom was five foot, she's an itty bitty thing.

And she just loved him.

I mean, they had their ups and downs, as everyone, but she never did get over the loss.

Beehner: There was more victims than 91 in that fire.

Some of those guys carried it with them their whole lives.

And to this day, are still carrying it.

I could only imagine, the things that they've seen.

You're 20, 30 years old, that would be terrible.

I had one guy that came up to me one year and he said, "You know, I understand the deal about the memorial every year for the fire guys.

But he says, what about us that lived through it?"

[Sound From Memorial Service] CaPpArelli: There wasn't anybody that didn't know or related to somebody that that happened here.

So it touched everybody in the valley, that loss, you know.

My neighbor, I hunted with him, we went, he perished in the fire.

He lived right next door to me.

NARRATOR: The fire burned for weeks.

It took days for rescue crews to build walls to create safe air pockets from which they could search for miners, and choke the fire.

Even as the grim toll mounted, rescuers held out hope for survivors on the l4,800-foot level.

There, a new shaft, the 4-foot-wide Number 12 Borehole, might be providing survivors fresh air.

Thousands of feet below, partners Tom Wilkinson and Ron Flory were trying to stay alive.

RON Flory: Tom and I had went out to the main drift and was going to open the air door and see if that would take the smoke that way instead of back to where we was at.

So we're trying to get it opened.

Then Tom passed out.

And I carried him back to the motor barn where the rest of the guys were, and we put him on top of the motor and took him back to where there was fresh air.

We thought there was fresh air earlier, and there is still fresh air there.

One guy took the motor out and tried to use the telephone.

Apparently the rest of them got on the motor and tried to get to where we was at, didn't make it.

They got within, you know, probably, 150 yards to where we was at and all of them perished.

Tom Wilkinson: I was out cold.

So I should have been actually the first one who died.

It was smoky all the time.

But we were surviving, so we managed to stay there.

NARRATOR: The two miners tapped a water line, scrounged some food from their colleagues' lunch buckets, and alternated between hope and despair.

Wilkinson: We drank a lot of water.

We always tried to keep water in us.

It gets pretty warm down there, at least 100 degrees.

NARRATOR: The U.S. Bureau of Mines borrowed a rescue capsule from the Atomic Energy Commission.

The plan was to lower two rescuers in the capsule to look for survivors on the 4,800-foot level.

Rescuers spent several days shoring up the No.

12 Borehole so they could safely send the rescue pod down.

Below, Flory and Wilkinson had no idea what was happening.

FLORY: We just basically sat there and talked and tried to figure out what they were doing to get us out.

We knew they had to come down and get us sooner or later.

We just didn't know if they'd get down in time to get us.

At that time, we didn't know that they was working on a bore hole or anything else Wilkinson: We knew there was a fire.

That's all we knew.

We didn't know how bad it was or where it was.

We didn't know anything.

And not knowing, I think that was the hardest.

And I think when I got down, Ron talked me up and vice versa.

By yourself you might have done some stupid things, because there were some stupid things suggested by Ron and I together.

We talked each other out of them.

And we had a light all the time.

We had that motor, so we had a light, because our headlamps, they finally gave out, you know, so we just had that battery.

So we had a light all the time.

We tried it with it off, but kept it on.

NARRATOR: On Day 8, Tom Wilkinson thought his partner was dreaming, or maybe seeing things.

Wilkinson: Ron looked up there and he said, "There's a light."

I thought, man, he's really lost it now, you know, because we weren't expecting if they did find us coming in, coming in the way they did.

So I looked and I said, "My God, you're right."

And he reached up and started beating on the pipe.

And of course the first thing we asked for was a cigarette.

And there for a while we swore we'd never smoke again after all that.

The first thing we asked for was a cigarette.

Wilkinson: And we asked them what was going on, how, what it was.

And then they explained to us, you know, how bad it was.

Until then, we didn't have the faintest idea.

That's when it really hit you.

I think, you know, we thought it was maybe just our level.

We didn't know.

NARRATOR: Rescuers pulled the men out.

Ron went first, then waited for Tom.

And they left the Sunshine together.

Flory: When we got to the main station there, they wanted to put us on a timber truck and push us out.

And Tom and I both told 'em, "No, we walked in, we're going to walk out."

So they got a guy on each side of us they let us walked out.

Wilkinson: And I remember when we first got to the portal and the open doors, and the light just hit us and people just started clapping and hollering.

And I just couldn't imagine a lot of people were out there cheering us on.

Hard to believe.

Especially after they had already knew that they lost somebody in their family.

Flory: When we come out of the portal and saw the lights and we just more or less put our heads down to shade our eyes.

And both of us walked past our wives, we didn't see them, they reached out and grabbed us as we were walking by.

We got a little flack on that.

Wilkinson: I really wasn't expecting something like that, you know.

What a big deal, a big deal, you know.

Just the lights hitting you, you know, and seeing all the people.

On this side was my brother and my dad and them are all there.

It was just a relief, I think.

But I just didn't really realize how much of the heartache that was still there with the people up there.

NARRATOR: At the hospital, the two survivors got to eat, and then got a special visit.

Wilkinson: The next day, Governor Andrus came up and seen us, Ron and I. I'll always remember this, and I got pictures, Governor Andrus brought us a six pack of beer!

It had to be luck.

I'm not really a religious person.

There's not really no way to explain, just the right place at the right time.

Like I said, I probably should have been the first one.

And I was just lucky Ron found good air and we made it there.

NARRATOR: As luck, or fate, or coincidence would have it, the man now in charge of re-reopening the Sunshine Mine is Wilkinson's son-in-law.

Henderson: I have just got amazing respect for that man, my father-in-law, Tom Wilkinson.

He was one of the two miners that were trapped underground at the Sunshine for eight days.

It's odd that towards the end of my career now, this will be my last gig, is the mine where my father-in-law was trapped 50 years ago underground.

Justin Wilbur, general foreman, Sunshine Mine: My uncle was here during the fire, and he was part of opening up that bore hole that got air down to the bottom.

I try to absorb every bit of it I can.

It's like being in a real-life history lesson.

You always learn from the past.

A tragic event but learned a lot from it and you'd better hold on to it.

NARRATOR: When the Sunshine mine reopened after the 1972 fire, Tom Wilkinson went back to mining and even visited the spot on the 4,800 level where he and Ron Flory had spent those frightening eight days.

Flory died in 2017.

Wilkinson: I don't know if it's something I had to prove to myself.

But I never thought of it that way.

I went back on 5,000 and I climbed up 4,800 and went back there where I spent a week.

I think I just had to see it.

And I stayed mining until they went on strike.

NARRATOR: Wilkinson went on to work for the Forest Service, but always missed working underground.

Wilkinson: Well, what's it they say?

Once a miner, you're always a miner.

NARRATOR: Sunshine Mine reopened, but the heyday of mining was coming to an end.

Strikes, bankruptcies and tough metal markets all played a role, as did new environmental regulations, which remain contentious to this day.

The Silver Valley cleanup has involved removing topsoil contaminated by pollution that came from smelter smokestacks.

Andy Helkey, Idaho DEQ: Most of our cleanup is related to legacy contamination from mining and smelting that happened here.

Mining began in the late 1880s.

The Bunker Hill smelter operated from 1917 to 1983.

So we have heavy metals contamination through the soil and throughout the floodplain and the communities that we've cleaned up.

Since 1989, we've cleaned up over 7,000 properties.

As the cleanup's progressed, I mean, initially you had those 2,600 jobs that disappeared basically overnight.

These communities became very depressed.

For decades, we have led Idaho in poverty rate and unemployment rate.

And this was a very pro-mining community.

Back when Bunker Hill was running it was the largest employer in the state of Idaho.

It had an annual payroll of $50 million.

But it was your way of life and it was your economy.

Aiken: It's one of the most contentious Superfund sites in the country because there are huge numbers of people who object to the entire process and think it's not necessary.

A lot of Silver Valley people think it's sort of outside folks coming in and telling them what to what to do.

Henderson: The role of mining in this state has no doubt shifted a lot over the last 30 or 40 years.

A lot of that has come about from absolutely appropriate changes in environmental standards.

The Silver Valley boomed for 70, 80 years, principally because there was an unregulated industry.

It wasn't until the enactment of the Clean Air and the Clean Water Acts of the 1960s and '70s, that really changed how we did how we treated the environment in the valley.

NARRATOR: While there's disagreement over the cleanup, there is no disagreement about one thing: Mines are safer places to work today.

Because of the Sunshine Mine fire, Congress mandated stringent new safety and training requirements in 1977.

Henderson: Out of the Sunshine fire, there's so much has changed.

I can't even begin to think how many lives probably have been saved as a result of the lessons learned from the Sunshine fire.

We don't look at safety as something that's a nuisance.

It is part of our value system and it's part of our culture.

If anybody visits Sunshine Mine or any other mines in the Silver Valley, they'll see dedicated refuge chambers that you can harbor in for weeks, if not months.

We keep them stocked with water.

They're air conditioned, they have food, communications, absorbents, sealing systems.

So there's new safety standards for welding, and fire-suppression systems, all of our mobile equipment has fire-suppression systems on them.

We have gas detection, real-life, real-time monitoring of gases that are coming out of the mine.

Higdem: This was a place of great change, and tragedy, but out of the tragedy, the industry changed.

I'm proud to be a part of that history, of that change.

I wasn't here in '72, but to be working here and know the history is an honor.

What came out of the event in the industry as far as mining safety, it's not just Sunshine.

It's all mines in America, all hard rock mining.

Something good came out of something so tragic.

[MUSIC] NARRATOR: In many ways, the Sunshine Mine is a time capsule, preserved essentially as it was in 1972.

Higdem: Working here, walking through the street or walking through quiet buildings, you get a sense of real living history.

Like going through a ghost town in the Old West, a lot of generations lived in this area, working here.

NARRATOR: The new ownership has kept up buildings and repaired machinery so they have access to the tunnels to map and explore.

And get ready to mine silver again.

Higdem: The whole mine was essentially turned off for a couple of years after Sunshine Mining called it quits.

Subsequently there was no maintenance, no care, no heat, power was turned off.

When we came here, it was, for all purposes, abandoned, and we had a lot of work in front of us.

In 2003, I was offered a job here to reboot the mine, get it going and do what I can do.

The main goal was to get the hoist running.

And so we did, and we got things like the boiler plant going.

We got power back on to other places and slowly woke up the queen of the Silver Valley.

Since about 2012, it's been quiet and we just keep it in good repair and keep the heat on and keep it clean.

Henderson: We're going to take the time to maintain the mine, protecting the asset as it is.

That is in advance of an exploration program, which will be to drill out 3,000 feet out into the walls of areas that are traditionally under-explored.

The mine has 36 named veins.

A lot of it is just sitting there, ready to go.

We're going to need to find a little bit more so that we can kind of refurbish what we have here, put in new, more modernized plants and safety systems and hoist accesses.

So that we can take advantage of that, not for just a short, short haul, but looking at Sunshine is most likely being able to produce the same 380 million ounces of silver it's produced over its last 100 years.

That timeframe?

Probably five years.

You'd be looking at around 300, 350 miners that would be full-time employed.

And I suspect that the secondary benefits of that will be another two people employed for every person employed at the mine supporting the industry.

That's a big ripple effect.

I keep saying the Sunshine Mine has got another day of sunshine ahead of her.

And I think it's going to be just as good as the last one.

NARRATOR: When the mining economy in the Silver Valley collapsed, it hit towns like Kellogg hard.

MAC Pooler, KELLOGG MAYOR: In 1981, when Bunker Hill shut down the mine, the smelter and the zinc plant, that killed 2,500 jobs, good-paying jobs, and put 2,500 people out of work.

Kellogg's population was 6,000.

Two years later it was under 3,000.

Those people had to leave our community, go someplace else.

We had no money.

People were leaving.

So we were at the crossroads.

We had to do something.

We said, now we've got one thing to offer at this time: That's recreation.

So we've got to keep that thing going until we figure out what we're going to do.

So we did.

And it wasn't easy.

NARRATOR: The city took over and expanded the ski resort, and even passed a bond to build the gondola that remains the centerpiece of the Silver Mountain Resort, which is in private ownership today.

Pooler: This was the only place in the United States you could drive off the freeway, five minutes later be sitting on a gondola, 10 minutes later, you're skiing on a mountain.

And a lot of years you could ski in the morning and go play golf in the afternoon.

The rails-to-trails started through with the cleanup from the Bunker Hill railroad grade, and that started bringing people in.

We got in step with the EPA and started working together with them as well as the state.

NARRATOR: As the Silver Valley hopes for future prosperity from future mining, the community draws visitors to its bike trails, water park, golf course and ski lifts.

A cleaner Silver Valley is enticing new residents with its natural beauty and recreation.

Aiken: A lot of people from elsewhere have found retirement there.

And tourism has helped the Silver Valley kind of revive.

And, it's such a beautiful area.

NARRATOR: The latest economic engine arrived on two wheels.

Chris O'Brien, Ride MontanaT: This is a premier race.

You get pros from all across the country.

The trails here are way different than we have in Missoula.

A lot rooty, rocky, technical.

You gain a lot of elevation, lose a lot of elevation with the gondola here, so it's pretty unique.

There's no other resort that I've been to in the U.S. that's anything like this.

Jenna Norris, mountain biker: We love the trails.

They're gnarly, but there is some fun flow trails.

You can really get any kind of trail you want.

Steep and techy, or flowy and fast.

You can just shred from top to bottom.

The mountain bike trails are amazing.

It's about an hour drive from Spokane.

It's an easy drive and it's just a quick hop over on the freeway.

Oh, I love coming to Kellogg because the community is awesome.

It's so fun, just hang out with your friends.

You can stop by the Bean down in Kellogg and grab a bagel or a drink afterwards.

It's the best.

O'BRIEN: The locals here are super welcoming.

I think mountain biking has done a lot for this community, and I think Kellogg's done a lot for mountain biking.

It's a great place.

It's got that mom-and-pop feel that we've lost in a lot of other places in the country these days.

[MUSIC] Pooler: We could have locked this place up and turned the lights off and moved.

But being stubborn, I guess, is helpful.

[MUSIC] Announcer: Idaho Experience is made possible with funding from the James and Barbara Cimino Foundation, devoted to preserving the spirit of Idaho.

From Anne Voillequé and Louise Nelson.

From Judy and Steve Meyer.

With additional support from the J.A.

and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, the Friends of Idaho Public Television, the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.