Today was Create your Own Adventure Day
It combined a lot of history with trail making, trail
finding, and trail combining.
Joshua Tree National Park apparently had almost 300 mines at
one time, plus a number of abandoned mine shafts that didn’t pan out. Today we found four or five mines, some of
which are not mentioned in our books or on our maps.
We started with a tourist hike to a mine with the most
colorful history. The legend is that it
was found by someone working at the Lost Horse Mine named Frank James (not THE
Frank James). But he was claim jumped,
murdered by the notorious McHaney gang.
The leader of this gang, Jim McHaney, began his career as a cattle
rustler, until he realized that stealing gold claims was more lucrative. Eventually he ended up in prison for a few
years, and after that retired to Los Angeles where he became a street
cleaner.
(Can you imagine the stories he would try to tell to his
street cleaning buddies about what a wild young man he once was. They probably all thought he was just some
doddering old fool making up crap like all of us doddering old fools do).
The mine was eventually sold to Bill Keys who himself was
convicted of manslaughter some years later and went to San Quentin.
It seems that being the owner of the Desert
Queen Mine was the wild west’s version of being the governor of Illinois—for
both you end up in prison.
The Desert Queen Mine was fun to poke around in.
After that, we left the tourist trail and headed for the
Eagle Cliff Mine. This trail was not
marked, but we had a description of how to get to it. After hiking for awhile, one could look up a
wash and see, at the top, a spire. The
idea was to hike/climb to that spire, which we did, with some difficulty at
times.
We found the mine, at the top. It was on a small, beautiful plateau. Not much there except a couple of old shafts.
Then, instead of wisely hiking back down the way we came, we
thought it would be more fun to get lost.
So we did, at least for awhile.
The first part was hiking down the other side of the
mountain. It was a VERY steep incline,
necessitating going very slowly. It
wasn’t dangerous in the sense that if one of us fell we would fall far, but the
trail was rocky and slick because of the sandy soil on the rocks.
But we made it, and began looking for the Split Rock Trail,
which we wanted to take for ¼ to ½ of a mile until we saw an old trail to
another mine we found on one of our maps.
But we couldn’t find that old trail.
Vicky noticed the tailings of an old mine about halfway up one of the
hills, and since it seemed to be in the correct direction (we have a great GPS
with a compass) we went there to explore.
It was nothing much, so we climbed to the top of the ridge
and found the mine we wanted to find:
The Elton Mine.
It was fun to
imagine that these mines were actually small communities at one time, complete
with homes, machines, and roads.
The miners were a hardy group of
men—braving the extreme heat and descending hundreds of feet into the earth to
try to gain their fortune (the main shaft for the Lost Horse mine descended 500
feet!). A few did, apparently.
From there, we sought out a trail called the Lucky Boy
Trail. It went through a wash that
involved going through a long boulder field with lots of little places one had
to crawl over and through. That was
fun.
Weird rock:
This day had a little of everything. The total distance was
not so great, 5.6 miles, and the elevation gain was not much at all, 1100 feet,
but it was hard work and slow going a lot of the time. We had a blast.
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