Collapsed 1917 gold mine and ghost-town ruins on Douglas Island
Treadwell Historic Trail, Douglas Island, Juneau, AK 99824
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free to walk the Treadwell Historic Trail; the site is managed by the Treadwell Historic Preservation and Restoration Society.
Access
Limited Access
Forested coastal trail with gravel paths, exposed concrete foundations, and the flooded glory hole; some uneven and overgrown sections.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1881 · Alaska Gold Mining History · 1917 Cave-In Disaster · Industrial Heritage
Mining at Treadwell began in 1881, when John Treadwell acquired claims on the Douglas Island shoreline opposite the future site of Juneau. Over the following decades the operation grew into a cluster of four mines feeding five stamp mills that ran nearly without pause, stopping only on Christmas and the Fourth of July. At its height the complex employed more than 2,000 people and counted among the largest hard-rock gold mines in the world, processing low-grade ore at enormous scale and supporting a company town with its own school, swimming pool, and clubhouse.
The geology that made Treadwell rich also undermined it. Three of the mines, the Treadwell, the 700-Foot, and the Mexican, had been driven more than 500 feet below sea level, beneath the floor of Gastineau Channel. On April 21, 1917, the workings between the mine and the channel began to leak. Crews were evacuated, and within hours the ground gave way. Seawater poured in and air pressure forced spray as high as 200 feet above the surface. The flooding was so sudden that the recorded losses were a dozen horses and a mule; one miner was reported missing and never accounted for, but the shifts had largely been cleared.
The Ready Bullion mine survived the 1917 disaster and continued in reduced operation until 1922, when it too closed. The townsite emptied. Buildings burned or were dismantled, and the forest grew back over the foundations. Today the Treadwell Historic Preservation and Restoration Society maintains a system of marked trails through the ruins, where the glory hole, mill footings, and the cave-in cavern remain visible along the Douglas Island shore.
Sources
Treadwell reads as a ghost town in the literal sense: a place where thousands of people lived and worked and then, within a few years, were gone. The 1917 collapse is the event that anchors its reputation. The image of seawater spraying hundreds of feet into the air while the ground caved into the channel gives the ruins a disaster narrative that most abandoned mines lack, and the cave-in cavern remains one of the most-photographed features on the trail.
Dark-tourism writeups describe the site's atmosphere in consistent terms: the quiet of the second-growth forest, the moss over concrete foundations, and the sudden openings of shafts and the flooded glory hole. The single unaccounted-for miner from the 1917 flood occasionally surfaces in retellings as the resident absence of the place, though the historical record treats him as missing rather than the subject of any haunting account.
The ruins are not promoted as a paranormal destination, and no formal investigation history is documented. The interest is in the scale of what was lost and the speed with which the forest reclaimed it. Visitors walk the trail for the industrial archaeology and leave with the feeling of a town that the ground simply took back.
Walk the network of trails that wind through the ruins of the Treadwell mine complex. Interpretive markers cover the mills, the New Office Building, the pump house, and the cave-in cavern left by the 1917 collapse. The trail loops along Sandy Beach and into the second-growth forest that has reclaimed the townsite.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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