“Yeah, Desert Sky - Dream beneath the Desert Sky”
A drive through Joshua Tree National Park might take a couple hours, viewing the park from the road. An exploration of the park would take a lifetime. Joshua Tree National Park has over 550,000 acres of wilderness filled with a variety of plants and animals that make their home in this land shaped by strong winds, unpredictable torrents of rain, and climatic extremes. Every now and then, man intrudes in this wilderness and leaves his brief, passing mark among the surreal geologic features that cover the landscape. Let’s go see what we can find.
I take a lot of pictures, as you Cali49ers have obviously discovered. Writing these posts and sharing photos of places I've visited is almost as fun as the adventure itself. I am currently shooting with a Nikon D7000 and my favorite lens is a Nikkor 18-200 zoom. I think it takes pretty good pictures overall, as long as I keep the sensor clean (it's amazing the amount of dust that can enter a camera body while changing lenses).
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Trails in the desert can twist and turn, disappear altogether, or branch off into unknown paths. No two directions are ever the same and often the journey is more memorable than the destination. And sometimes the journey and the destination meld into a fine adventure, in a desert synergy that seems to happen to me very often in J Tree. Such was the case on the 4th of July.
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Every once in a great while, during a hike out in J Tree, I'll run across something that makes me stop and say "ay carumba," and wonder if I'm hallucinating. Such was the case recently. It was July 4th, the blazing sun seemed to stand motionless above me as I wove my way through creosote bushes and plodded through scorching Pinto Wash sand. I think I had actually found nowhere. It was incredibly hot, and at one point, I swear I heard the ghost of Matt Riley urging me to return to old Blue before it was too late. "You'll never make it to Cottonwood," he whispered.
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I was heading north on the Old Dale Road, into the hotter, drier Colorado desert portion of J Tree. There are no Joshua Trees here, nor Pinyon Pines but the Old Dale Road leads to an abundance of mining history in both the Dale and the Monte Negras mining districts. My goal for the afternoon was to try to find three wells - once important water sources for the mines and the people who traveled the area.
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Who discovered the Black Butte Mine? How much gold did it produce? When was it in operation? Was it once known as the Gold Tiger Mine? Where was the mining camp? Unfortunately, no one really knows for sure as no early records have been found that would answer these questions.
Read MoreJoshua Tree National Park, the California Gold Country, forgotten places in the Mojave Desert. These are a few of my favorite things.
