The westward course of bathtub rings (Potash, Utah)

Where does salt come from? And how can I never have wondered that before? The bathtub ring of Lake Mead and the westward course of empire should have got me thinking about this sooner.

Cans, stripes, luck (Carrara NV)

It was a lovely cloudy day on Sunday. I'm still delighted by stunning blue sky days here, but sometimes a brewing storm can be even more beautiful. It wasn't heavy enough to be raining down to ground level much, but the virga/walking clouds were trailing lightly over the hills, and the sunlight was dappling the land through huge crazy cloud patterns.

Raffle prize - a chunk of halite from California.
Approx 25 cm across. Yes, it's pink.

We started out by driving over the hill to Pahrump, where Simon had won two raffle prizes at last week's rock and gem show. (Our batting average lately is astounding, actually. Last time I entered a raffle was at the rock and gem club meeting a few weeks ago, where I also won two prizes, one of them the grand prize. Hey statistics, you just keep looking the other way, okay? Okay.) The prize pickup was handled in a particularly Nevadan way, by meeting up in a casino car park.

The Evening Star Mine - a mountain bike jaunt in the Mojave desert

One of our favourite desert spots is the Cima Dome / Teutonia Peaks walk in the Mojave National Preserve. We generally park at the Mojave Cross in the shade of a grand juniper tree, and there are graded dirt roads that stretch invitingly north and west towards Kessler Peak and the Ivanpah Mountains. We've looked at them on a number of occasions and wondered to each other what might be up there. Then, at the Kelso depot visitor centre, we bought Michel Digonnet's excellent Hiking the Mojave Desert - and it showed what looked like a pretty do-able mountain bike loop, a few miles up to Copper Cove, rich with old mines from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

So when a comparatively cool day came along, we thought we'd take our bikes out, ride up the Kessler Peak road, and see what we could find. We loaded up with plenty of water and a White Knight's pannier full of necessities from spare innertubes to a thermos of iced coffee ... and put the feet to the pedals.

Pancake prickly pear

The road was certainly not 2WD suitable, with a high crown that would have more than tickled Harry's belly, besides loose sandy patches and momentum-swallowing gravel. There had been a big storm through a few days before; the surface is quite possibly usually better than this. (Or then again, possibly not ... the National Parks Service has a budget backlog longer than the Teen's Thinkgeek wishlist and this is a wilderness preserve, not Grand Canyon South Rim.)

Anyhow, it was an interesting road. One of the things about this region is the vast variety of rock exposed by the upthrust and erosion as the crustal plate was alternately stretched, squeezed and twisted. Riding or walking through alluvial fan, you see just all kinds of things. Lovely glittering quartz and its friends are over-represented here. When I could drag my attention away from just surviving the next few seconds, or luckily was off the bike to walk it through some especially rocky or washed patch of road, the contrast of colours and textures were striking. The vegetation is lush this summer, Joshua tree 'forest' and all sorts of cholla and prickly pear cactus among other things.

Does this pic make me look intrepid? Nah.

And, disclosure: I'm a 'fraidy-cat. I wish I had Simon's gung-ho confidence on a bike, but I have to substitute grit, and walking the hard parts. I kept just locking up when the wheels started dragging in sticky, stop-you-instantly sand or washed out mini canyons interspersed with fist-sized chunks of rock. Embarrassing. Stressful. (It wasn't the terrain as much as the terror. Last time I came off my mountain bike I was off it for a year with a rotator cuff injury and my body still remembers this, since that year was only up a few months ago.) But I finished the ride, did not fall, did not die of heart failure, and did not swear at my long-suffering companion. Proud of self.

I was somewhat consoled for my timidity when we met a party in a big 4WD ute/flatbed. They were stopped in the roadway so we, necessarily, stopped behind them, and we chatted a few minutes ... they had been out playing in the desert too. And they thought we were "hardcore," riding bikes. Well - maybe. I don't feel very hardcore.

They headed away back towards the paved road, and we continued on our way. We didn't have a large scale topo map, so we were pretty careful to stick to the main road. As it rose up the hill we started to spot old mine workings, including a large wooden headframe. We kept on until we found roads heading up towards that wooden structure, which literally has bits swinging in the breeze.

This is the Evening Star Mine, where tin, copper, and tungsten were extracted. You can look down through the picturesquely rusting safety cap and see the vertical extent of the number 2 shaft - as well as get down into the trench between it and number 1. We saw the old powder house, the ruins of a metal cabin, and traces of several other buildings up on the plateau westward of the main workings.

 

Headframe for hauling and milling tin	Any old iron
The powder house	75 feet or more down #2 shaft
Safety cap, thx NPS!	Spot the turquoise blue pebbles, e.g. at lower RH

I was fascinated by the tailings - copper having been mined here, there are pretty blue and green pebbles, some with green crystalline layers. Many of the stone and rock pieces underfoot are a handsome olive green; others are white and glitter with tiny crystals. I even saw one pebble that was striped in four colours: ochre, deep grey, cream, and bright turquoise blue.

Before starting back, we stopped in the shade of a Joshua tree for iced coffee and fresh dates. And observed a fire ring nearby ... which means we can come back and camp some time!

As we came back down the rough road, the early evening saw the rabbits and other skitterers coming out to play. Mat time on the blanket next to Harry, and then we re-packed the car full of bikes and headed home through another sublime southwest evening.

No one even knew his name: Pioche, NV

At Boot Hill Cemetery, Pioche, the graves
are decorated with boots, shoes, and flowers.

That's Pee-oatch, not Pee-osh. I wonder what Monsieur Pioche would think? Guess as long as that ore keeps being dug out and trucked off, maybe he wouldn't be too bothered.

They certainly pulled a lot of money out of the ground around here, and probably more than the $25 million of silver that showed up on the reports.

Pioche was a pretty rough town even by Western standards, back in the day. They say that of the first 76 deaths in the town, 75 were from unnatural causes. Or something like that. The precise story varies. The several cemeteries tell a tale ... this is the smallest and most rustic, and the only one we went to so far.

"Shot by a coward
as he worked his claim
No one even knew his name
Pioche Nev" 

Visiting the grave sites, lead poisoning seems to be right up there: "shot by officers 5 times", "shot while working his claim", "shot by in back 5 times from ambush". They buried these men with their boots on, and they say that's why it's called Boot Hill cemetery (one of many).

This is what they had in mind when they called it the Wild West, I suppose. It doesn't sound like the most fun a person can have (for illustration, watch an episode or two of Deadwood.) Makes for sobering visiting, and a half-disbelieving sense of unreality yet again.

Apart from a dodgy history and a lot of graves, Pioche is a quaint little town insinuated into the side of a steep hill and spreading down its slopes most of the way to the 93. Strictly, it's an unincorporated community. This surprised me as it's also the county seat of Lincoln County. Off Main St, the roads are narrow and twisty - luckily we didn't meet any oncoming traffic. Pioche has a variety of gritty historic buildings, including, notably, the courthouse that cost a million dollars, which you'll have to click through to or wait til next time we go because we, driving around bemused, clean forgot to photograph.

Aerial tram

If you like industrial ruins (yes! I do!), Pioche does have a fantastic aerial tram, mostly intact but out of service now. It dates to the 1920s or so, and is complete with buckets and 'danger' signs.

We spent a while poking round an antique store, and I bought three 1920s to 40s surveyor's notebooks detailing survey records of a nearby silver mine - mainly because I like the books themselves, oh such wabi-sabi, full of obscure hand-written pencil notes.

The Bristol mine can be seen, and its associated ghost town too, (if the landowner grants permission - it's still owned by the Company) but it sounds like it's an off road adventure so it goes on the someday list for now.

Back to Kershaw Ryan to cool our feet in the wading pool,
then for a quiet evening with a campfire.

Itinerary

Saturday: North on 93. Turn onto 321 and to Pioche. Northeast on 321 to rejoin 93. 93 south, back to Caliente and Kershaw-Ryan