North Country

Thirty-four years ago, Star Lake, New York, once a thriving Adirondack town with a population of a few thousand, a golf club, a drive-in movie theater, and everything else you'd expect in rural New England, collapsed. It had always been a company town, ever since the 1890s when the Sykes family controlled most of the logging in the then town of Clifton, and continuing through decades of stability between the paper mill at Newton Falls, and Benson Mines closer to the village, employing hundreds of union workers and quite literally building the town. Then in 1977 the mines closed, never…

Benson's Mines wasn't anything new to me, I'd already been a few times last year, and seen most of the upper complex. But like any good location, it's full of secrets. This time, those secrets included an entire second complex on the other side of "Lake" Benson (the body of water created by the flooded mine). Much more isolated, this lower Benson would have survived in much better condition except for the out buildings being destroyed by fire in 1974. These leftover mine tracks go everywhere around the property, the particularly circular ones still hosting 4-wheeler racing, and the rest…

On the last few urbex camping trips, we kept noticing something on the side of route 3 that looked huge, abandoned, and very, very blue. After a bit of research, I figured out that it was Benson's Mines, and no one had really bothered to explore it yet, since it's in the absolute middle of North Country nowhere, and no one from the 'establishment' thought it was worth the trip at all. And they were so, so wrong. I left this place with a very profound feeling of 'coming out' as an explorer: this was my first find worth anything…