Скачать или смотреть Saline Valley Salt Tram - A visual tour

The Saline Valley Salt Tram holds a peculiar fascination in me. Having seen some of the old towers from the Owens Valley to the Saline Valley and the truly brutal eastern side of the Inyo Mountains where it climbs, I'm in awe of what these men accomplished in 1912 and the years they tried to turn a profit off this folly of a business idea. 4 companies tried, and failed, to succeed from 1913 to 1935. The tram was essentially built of wood (1 million board ft. of lumber), and 650 tons of iron, all of which had to be moved to different locations along the 13.4 mile tramway, much of which is on cliff sides which would challenge today's civil engineers. I'm in awe of what they built, even if it was a silly idea. Salt. It was for salt. Table salt.
This short video is basically a Google Earth fly-over the 13 miles of the tramway, but I've added some fun factoids and photos from the era and a few photos and videos I've created, to hopefully give you a sense of scale and bewilderment of how they built this thing, and manned it, in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth - Death Valley.
My thanks to the handful of people who have written books and blogs about the tram and collected old photos.