“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.
Half a mile west of the Cholla Cactus Garden, there are two small hills on the south side of Pinto Basin Road. That fact, in and of itself, is not really a big deal as there are small hills all over J Tree. These two hills deserve mention however, because they serve as a great landmark for the trail/mine road that leads up into the Hexie Mountains and the Golden Bee Mine.
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It seems amazing to me that an operation as large as the Mission Mill evidently was, can have so little information concerning its owners and operation to be found. But I'll bet the information is out there somewhere, I just haven't looked in all the right places yet.
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Why is it called the Pinto Wye Arrastra? I've wondered about that and had a theory, so I decided to see if I could find any facts to back it up. And as things turned out, my suspicions were correct. As it wasn't the only arrastra in the park, it couldn't just be called "the arrastra." That would cause uncertainty and vague feelings of unrest. But as it was located about three-quarters of a mile northwest of a "Y" in the main park road (the spot where Pinto Basin Road meets Park Blvd.), someone somewhere sometime called it the Pinto Wye Arrastra and the name stuck.
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Cottonwood Canyon holds an interesting site on its western slopes, a site known as the Moorten Mill. There's not much left there to see, and the historical information available for snoopers like me is even scantier. But I'll share what I was able to find, along with some speculation and questions.
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Driving south along Pinto Basin Road, the mountains squeeze in on both sides of the road as you drive through Wilson Canyon, a couple miles northwest of the Cholla Garden. The Hexies are on the south and the Pintos are on the north. Just as Wilson Canyon begins to open up and become Pinto Basin, there are a number of mining prospects, shafts, tunnels and drifts on the southern slopes of the Pinto Mountains.
Read MoreJoshua Tree National Park, the California Gold Country, forgotten places in the Mojave Desert. These are a few of my favorite things.
