07/26/2026
Perched high above the San Juan Mountains, this abandoned tramway tension station once kept thousands of feet of stationary track cable under constant tension.
The heavy support cables that carried the ore buckets entered the building from each direction, passed over massive pulleys, and were connected to enormous timber counterweight boxes filled with rock. As the cables stretched with changing temperatures and years of use, gravity kept the tension nearly constant.
Meanwhile, the moving haul rope simply passed through the station, pulling bucket after bucket across the mountainside.
More than a century later, the ore is gone, but the engineering still tells its story.
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