In which Al goes to Heaven?

Yesterday after stirring out doors very late,( hey if I can’t sleep in on a cold winter’s morning when could I?) Deb and I headed off for one of our weekend trips.
This time we headed for Walhalla named for the heavenly residence of the old Norse gods.
Walhalla is a Gold-Rush Era town that sits in a deep, narrow valley between the mountains of Gippsland in eastern Victoria.
Like many of the gold rush towns Walhalla all but melted away after the mines closed in the early 20th Century .
But what remains gives a hint of what was and is quite charming.
The Walhalla Star Hotel still serves it original purpose.

These old shops now cater to tourists - the Grey Horse which looks to have been a stable once is now a café.

A word about the trees, the tree still in autumn colours is what we loosely term an “exotic” in Oz. That is a plant native to foreign shores. Most Oz trees are Eucalyptus and so evergreen. The mountain slopes  in the background look much the same all year.

This is the vault of the old Bank of Victoria in the town.
 
When the mines closed the bank was demolished and relocated to the town of Moe away to the south. The Vault itself was not worth removing.
 Despite being only one of the banks in town the amount of gold that was stored here was staggering.

The bottom figure is based on $600 per ounce. What is gold now $1600 per ounce?

As I said Walhalla  sits in a narrow valley, land was so short that the old fire station

 was actually constructed across the creek.