The site itself was a two-mile hike from town, and dig participants had to cross dredge trailings , bridge a stream , and continue into an unimproved wilderness trail to get to work every day. Warren itself is a very small town with only a dozen year-round residents and one place of business , where the town's one public phone is located. Every year a target shooting contest brings in tourists, and hunting, fishing, and relaxing bring in other vacationers for the summer. The Guard Station next to the old Warren school , where there is a well-maintained informational display about Warren's history and the presence of Chinese miners in the area, houses smokejumpers during fire season. In winter, the road is closed to wheel traffic, and the town can be reached only by plane and snowmobile.
Mail is delivered twice weekly.
Gold mining has been an important activity in the area for over a hundred years. Most spectacularly, miners used immense dredging machines , with buckets measuring about 1.5 m across , to dig up entire riverbeds in the Warren Meadows. The dredges left long, high piles of rubble, or tailings, all over the valley, one of which caught a Buick Special some time in the 1940's. Dredging operations were halted during the Second World War, but underground mining continues today. The Chinese in Warren performed mostly placer and sluice mining on the hillsides.