Friday, we did our third trip towards Adams Mine. Yesterday, John had seen the place where the road to Adams left the Wrigley road above Adams Mine where the wash was shallow enough to cross.
 |
| Tailings pile for Adams |
We walked down to the tailings pile. There were a few foundations on the top of the pile,
and a huge shaft (about 37 paces around the outside), that went deep into the earth. The rarity is that this shaft is not fenced.
Rather than walk back up the road to get across the wash, we followed a burrow trail along a cliff beside the mine, down into the wash. Lower down, we came to a cross road which went up to a couple of small tailings piles with shafts. We believe these were also part of Adams Mine, as they were closer to the GPS location indicated for Adams Mine than the large tailings pile further up the wash.
Saturday, we were planning on taking a slightly different route from the one yesterday, as there is a road branching off the Wrigley road toward Black Range, but there is an small valley in between the two roads. As we observed last week, there is usually something at the other end of the road. However, on our way out, we encountered two fellows who were getting ready to go hiking to the mines. We asked them if they knew the name of the mine with the long shaft. Unfortunately, they didn't. However, one of them told us that if we went into the tunnel in the wash below Black Range Mine, you would actually get to a vertical shaft from above. We decided that would be worth seeing. We headed there, and indeed, with the aid of a little led flashlight, found the vertical shaft. It was about 100 yards from the entrance. We had passed a Y about 60 yards in, so we headed back to the Y and followed it for about 80 yards. We stopped at that point, because we could see bats flying ahead of us. We figured we should not disturb them anymore, so we left. There wasn't enough light in the tunnels for us to get any pictures.
It's just amazing the number of tunnels and shafts in this small area. From there we went on to Black Range Mine, then around and above it to a concrete structure. It was between 12 and 15 feet deep, and about 15 feet long. It was much deeper than anything, other than shafts, that we have seen at any of the mines. It was so deep that an animal had gone into it somehow, and then died there. All that was left was the skeleton. We figured it couldn't get up the walls, had died, and then been stripped down to the bones by crows or vultures.
 |
|
 |
|
Sunday, we headed for the Oatman Southern Mine. It is one of a couple that are toward the river from Route 66. We had to walk along the highway about a third of mile to get to the road paralleling the highwy back to it. The BLM road was the only one marked on the AZ topo map going to the mine. It was about a two mile walk, not on the best of roads, as the surface had a lot of loose rock, particularly going across the many washes. We came to several junctions along the way heading across to the highway, none of them marked on the map.
 |
| One of the bigger artifacts we have seen |
Once we got to the mine, the road angled up above a few of the tailings piles, with shafts angling down into the hill.
 |
| Angled shaft |
It then came back above the lower shafts. There were a couple of shafts on the other side of the hill, but eventually we got to a point where we could come down to some shafts on the same side of the hill. One of these tunnels went right through the top of the hill, only about 50 yards.
We were able to come back down the east side of the hill, so we didn't have to take the long way back down.
Once we were done with Oatman Southern, we took a road that went straight east to the highway, coming out about 1.4 miles from the trailer. We walked the edge of the road to get back. About 1/2 a mile back, we looked down on the buildings of Oatman Syndicate Mine.
On Monday, we packed up our stuff and headed to the KOA at AVI Casino, just across the Colorado. Laundry day.
On Tuesday, we went over to the casino for breakfast. The breakfast buffet didn't open until 7:00. Since we were 20 minutes early, we went to Feathers Cafe in the casino instead. Great service, good size meals, but not quite as flexible as a buffet for about the same price. Then we headed north through Las Vegas, then east about 20 miles to Valley of Fire Road. We took advantage of the Moapa Paiute Tribal service station at the intersection to fill up the truck. Then we went about 6 miles south on Valley of Fire Road to an area with several trailers, and a couple of cars, one of them with a tent. We pulled into one of the spots available for camping, and got setup. The north side of the hills here only has a hint of the red rocks that are found about 6 miles further south, but we thought we would explore this area for a few days. On the way south we saw quite a few vehicles parked along the edge of the road with people wandering around in flat desert. Don't know what they were searching for, but assume there must be some kind of mineral here that is popular.
We found a blog
about hiking in the Buffington Pockets, one of the points of interest on our Nevada Topo Map in this area.
On Wednesday morning, which was cooler by about 10 degrees than we have had for a few weeks, we headed off to drive toward Buffington Pockets. It looked like we should be able to drive parallel to the hills until we got to Bitter Springs Trail. However, the road that carried on past our trailer split into a bunch of options, only one of which was on the hiking GPS. It wasn't clear which one went through so we headed back to Valley of Fire Road, then toward I-10 until we got to the corner where Bitter Springs Trail heads south toward Buffington Pockets. Bitter Springs Trail is marked as a National Back Country By-way. However, the comments on the web-site said that they parked at a point beyond which there were no turn-arounds, and a 4-wheel drive would be necessary. Even at the beginning of the road, we had to go slow due to the washboard. We parked at a point that was 2.3 miles from the point on our gps for Buffington Pockets. A short distance up the road, the washboard got a lot better.
 |
|
About 1.5 miles up the road, we got to a wide area where we could have parked, and just down the hill a couple of SUVs were parked just before the gap heading into the Muddy Mountains. Once you get into the mountains, (into the 'pocket'?), the color of the rocks changes entirely. It is an incredible area.
Near the point marked on the gps, we saw the dam that is mentioned in the blog above.
There was a hiking group of about 9 people heading toward it. We asked them if they had seen the petroglyphs. They said they had seen them about an hour earlier, further up the road. However, there is a smaller group around a corner we had come by already. After we looked at the stream coming through the dam, we headed back and found the petroglyphs.
 |
| Buffalo images ;) |
Then we decided it was time to head back, since we had walked over 3 miles. We got a picture of a butterfly sunning itself and a hummingbird posing on the top of a bush..
Partway back, we got a call from a 604 area code. Our phone beeped every minute until we got back to the track telling us to pick up the voicemail. When we got back to the truck, there was a pre-recorded voicemail from Woody's RV. Need to get off their phone list.
On Thursday morning, we headed south toward Wyatt Silica Mine. We had checked the internet for info on this mine, but couldn't find anything. We looked at the location on Google Maps satellite view, and didn't see anything of significance at the co-ordinates for it. However, a road ran across from where we are parked to about .7 miles north of the co-ordinates. On our way out, we passed a couple of sites where people had come in late yesterday. One woman hung on to her dog as we went by, and the other was walking a golden retriever on a parallel road. We followed the road on the GPS for about 2 miles to about the closest point on the road to the mine. There we saw a side road going over a small rise about half a mile away. We headed across to that road and followed it, heading generally toward the mine site. After a while, we got to a point where the road was going perpendicular to the mine site. However, we figured that maybe the mine location was more likely to be near the road, than at the co-ordinates where we couldn't see any development. At the 3.25 mile point, we were no closer to the mine, and weren't optimistic of finding anything, so we stopped for a rest before heading back. It was actually a nice little spot on a wash with some hills similar to Buffington Pockets.
 |
 |
| Interesting patterns in the rock |
|
 |
| Odd stem |
No comments:
Post a Comment