Mine tour bigger than ever!
A tour group is all smiles as they return to the gift shop following their experience on the Sierra Silver Mine Tour.
WALLACE — In Wallace, tourism is the name of the game. And perhaps nobody is doing it better than the Sierra Silver Mine Tour.
In a historic mining community, what could be more popular than a mine tour? The most accurate answer to that question might be nothing.
The Sierra Silver Mine Tour embraces the two most prevalent topics in Wallace: Mining and history. The mine itself was discovered in 1900, but over the years declining mineral returns effectively kept it from full scale production. The mine changed hands numerous times until the 1960s when it was used to give local high school students hands-on training in the skills needed to be a miner.
In 1982, a group of local people formed the Sierra Silver Mine Tour nonprofit organization and turned the old mine into a living history exhibit. Each tour comes with a quick trolley ride through Downtown Wallace before heading up Nine Mile Canyon to the mine site.
Visitors get a fully immersive experience, walking through the tunnels — or drifts — of an underground mine. Retired miners guide the tour, showing guests what a day in the life of a hard rock miner looks like.
42 years later, the Sierra Silver Mine Tour is running stronger than ever and now offers several tours a day, as well as a full-scale gift shop for visitors to peruse.
Nationwide, cost increases have forced people to rethink some of their recreational activities, but that issue hasn’t landed on the Sierra Silver Mine Tour.
“We’re never not busy anymore,” new tour director Stacey Strange said. “We’ve hit peak season and it’s not slowing down.”
Over the years, the tour has been exceptionally successful, but in 2020 as things began to reopen following the COVID-19 shutdown, the tour went gangbusters.
“We had 20,000 people take the tour in 2020,” Kelly Woods said. “When I first started it was like 10 to 12,000. Now, we average between 16 and 20,000 per season. We were almost too busy that season in 2020.”
Woods has been with the tour for seven years and has enjoyed watching it grow.
“People are always looking for things to do and this is such a cool thing to do,” Woods said. “People love learning, they love history. Plus, this is something an entire family can do together. We get a lot of family reunions, field trips and tour groups.”
The tour is open on a seasonal basis, running from May through October, but according to Strange, the gift shop component of the tour will be expanding.
“We are opening an online shop,” Strange said. “We are also going to expand the days that our gift shop is open during the year. We were open during Skijor this year and we were really successful.”
Strange is still hammering out the details, but she expects these changes to go into effect later this year.
The Sierra Silver Mine Tour is open seven days a week from 10 a.m. through 4 p.m., running 12 tours per day.
For more information or to book a tour, visit www.silverminetour.org or call 208-752-5151. People can also visit the gift shop located at 509 Cedar St. in Wallace.
The tour is currently looking for trolley drivers, anyone interested must have a Commercial Driver’s License with a passenger endorsement.
The gift shop of the Sierra Silver Mine Tour has plenty of historic, mining, and Wallace-themed items.
