Crossing th Colorado.

Very long ago in a place far away, J. J. Parsons would define places by their rivers and watersheds… To me this makes sense… and today I will leave the Mojave River, and head east over the Colorado… The great river of the Southwest….  Earlier in the trip I found I was talking to a fellow graduate of UC Berkeley’s department of Geography…. We had similar views on landscape and the world… It made sense...

First breakfast at Penny’s… then up to Calico, the fake ghost town… it’s a good fake ghost town…  What it lacks in authenticy, it makes up in good clean restrooms…  I call it Knotts Berry farm in the desert, but that is unfair… Walter Knott did a good job of recreating the one time silver boom town… and San Bernardino treats it like a historic place and interpets it for school children in a good way and signs say which buildings are recreations with photos of the original and the new… 

After Calico I dropped down hill a bit to walk the unmarked ruins of a silver mill and Marion, the borax plant before heading east, first on Rt 66, then onto I-40…. After a hard fast run, In Needles I dropped off I-40 heading towards Oatman… 10 miles out I traded pavement for a BLM dirt track…  near the old railroad grade… it can’t be called a road… it was washed out, and occasionally hard to follow… It took a full hour to go less than 10 miles… 

Oatman is another tourist ghost town… with scheduled gun fights and such… Oatman has “wild” burros wandering the street (singular, there is only one main street….)  but at least the burros are really cute… 

Then over the pass and on to Kingman… I am staying at the La Trovatore motel… an old motel, said to the be the first in Arizona with baths in every room…  Notable celebrities stayed here…  The current owners have rehabilitated what had become a rundown place, using a Rt 66 theme…  The rooms are tiny but nice… the people are better… its not the Hilton… its better and more authentic in a weird wacky way… 

On arriving in Kingman I found the road had been hard on the Jeep and I had to tighten the latch bolts on the tire carrier...  I will likely have to address other issues… This was the worst dirt road I have ever traversed.  It was wonderful...

Yesterday was my My 21,915th day on the planet… that is 60 years…  for dinner I walked up the street to the Dambar steak house and had a rib eye steak… and a whiskey for desert… a proper birthday dinner…  Greetings from friends were overwhelming…

Today I spent the morning doing research… on the local railroad… the Superior court had a case file on their bankruptcy… generally bankruptcies are Federal court cases but this was territory, not a state and things were done differently…  The County Courthouse had the railroad mortgage and other records… 

Having spent time inside court houses I drove east back to near Oatman… in search of the Leland and Mitchell and Vivian Mines… I had coordinates… longitude and latitude… and it turned out the day before I was two canyons off… I found the location, but it was fenced off with “No Trespassing” signs… I found the railroad headed that way and could see the mines on the hill side… I am happy… 

Back in Kingman, I had a beer at the local brewery… then BBQ at a joint across the street… Now back at the motel, sitting outside, listening to music and writing… It’s a bit breezy and cloudy… it appears a monsoon is blowing in

Goodnight…

Wandering in the Desert

Sunday... The conference over, the group scattered... I  traveled south in convoy with a few other cars, stopping to look at railroad remains along the way... Dropping into the Owens Valley at Mt Montgomery Pass... Slipping back into California at Benton...  The White Mountains and the Sierra peaks still snow capped from recent storms...

The group broke up just north of Bishop...  I stopped at Laws to look at their turntable and the depot....  The 100+ year old wooden turntable is sagging and won't turn... A friend had asked me to take a look...  The depot needs paint, and some want to keep the "old weathered look"... Others just want to paint it... I wanted to take a look for myself.  I am in the paint it camp...

I stopped for supplies in Bishop for supplies... Gas, ice, and sunscreen... Then south through big pine, lone pine and Independence,  then headed east, pausing in Keeler before crossing the Panamints, dropping into Panamint Valley the over Towne pass and into Death Valley...

Once in the Park, I stopped at the visitor's center to show the magic card and jet the little blue piece of paper for the windshield that says I have paid my entrance fee.   It was 118 degrees… they were having the first heat wave of the season.  I got a room at the Furnace Creek Ranch, then made my way down to Badwater to watch the landscape change as the sun went down...

It was dark by the time I returned... I had something to eat then sat outside in the heat and checked email...

The next morning I took my time getting up, then headed south... This time on the un paved west road, pausing at Eagle Borax works... Now just a mound of mud...  Regaining pavement 40 miles later... Then over the hills, startling a turkey vulture as I crested Jacobs pass... Reaching Shoshone, where I picked up gas and visited the local museum, then to Baker where the world's largest thermometer has been renovated by a local radio station... It said it was 97 degrees, but the Jeep (which seemed to agree with the Death Valley thermometer said it was 102...

From Baker I  dropped south through Kelso and the old railroad depot hotel and “club”, now National Park Service Visitor center and Amboy... in Amboy I found the right of way with ties for both the railroad that ran on Bristol lake... one abandoned in the 1920's.... then on to Daggett... last evening on my own I found a couple of sites including a railroad that used mules to pull (empty) cars up hill and gravity to let them (now loaded) roll down... the mules either rode down on flat cars or were only fed at the bottom, so released and found their own way down... 

Tuesday I met with a young local rail fan (and grandparents) and we found significant traces of the American Borax and Calico and Daggett railroads, then followed the Borate and Daggett its full length...  Beyond we found the short lived Palm Borate…  the tall bridge site and the tunnel…

On the back side of Calio Mountain I saw I spotted a roadrunner… There were no Coyotes or acme products to be seen… Luckily there were no snakes… this is snake territory, Mojave Greens… I didn’t need to see snakes… 

Dinner at one of the two diners… Peggy’s and Penny’s… both stainless steel with counters and booths… 

On to Arizona tomorrow…out of the Mojave desert and into Mohave County...

On the Road Again… Apologies to Willie… A story in several chapters

Chapter 1… Stuck in Hawthorne, Again…  

But Hawthorne Nevada isn’t Lodi…  and I am not a down and out singer, and I have a way out…

Its near the center of Nevada, at the south end of Walker Lake… Its not somewhere you go to vacation… but the people here are really nice… everyone… occasionally suspicious, but once they talk to you nice

Its home to the largest ammunition depot in the world… they have bombs and strange explosives here and much of the local population is employed as guards… they have guns… but once they talk to you they are really nice and helpful…  I may have spoken to 4 or 5 of them… apparently I may be suspicious at first glance… 

I am here for a railroad history conference… Hawthorne had a railroad from 1881 to 1904… today it has a different railroad to ship explosives and bombs and things that go “boom”…. That railroad was built in 1939 when they built the world’s largest ammunition depot here… Yesterday we got to ride the new railroad… standing on the side walkways of the locomotives… 

Today we are exploring Mina…  Once a railroad town… a junction… but the last train pulled out 20 years ago, and now it’s a  marginal desert community on Hwy 95…  No store, no gas, but there is a good hamburger stand and the Mina Club, a bar…  There is a row if identical railroad houses… then a few slightly larger, presumably for “management”… there are railroad sheds in back yards and at least a couple of box cars scattered about.  Our group numbering 60+ wandered the streets, presumably startling and confusing the locals… Then back to Hawthorne… again… 

In Hawthorne one of our numbers finds an interesting building on a side street…. It appears to be a very small railroad depot… moved here from elsewhere…  Andrew and I inspect measure, photograph and paint sample and conclude that it is a 1870’s Central Pacific building, likely moved into the area in 1904, and abandoned by the railroad by 1910…. Then moved here as a house…  Weird finds like this are why we are here… 

Chapter 2… Ghost towns….

Today we headed further south… to Belleville and Candelaria and other places, once inhabited and thriving, and now rarely noted on maps… only foundations and rusty cans remain… 

Belleville was a mill town… there were two large silver mills, processing the ore from Candelaria… Belleville had a reliable water source, Candelaria did not and milling needs water…  Belleville died when Candelria found water and the milling moved elsewhere… Belleville remained a railroad stop, but when the mills left they turned off the water and the railroad had to haul water in tankcars…   The mill foundations are impressive… massive… the rusty can scatter significant… there is still a cemetery up the canyon… 

Beyond, well up the canyon and over a couple of low divides is Candelaria… the mining town… there are still ruins of a couple of stone stores, a few dug out cabins, more cans and the round hole in the ground that marked the railroad’s turntable… much of the higher works and the railroad line have been wiped out by modern strip mining, their pits but mostly the waste piles… 

We continue, looking for Tonopah Jct…. then on to Sodaville…  Here was another railroad town, but the landowner wanted too much for the water rights, and the railroad moved its facilities (but not the tracks) to Mina, 4 miles north… but there was a mill here…. We walked the ground, found the mill foundations, and took a modern picture to match a historic picture…  along the way we found a snowball in the desert… a maked “SNOWBALL” fire brick from England…  Then back to Hawthorne, again… 

Next time, on to Death Valley….