“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.
The Ryan Ranch Ruins at Lost Horse Well have intrigued me from the first time I saw them many years ago, whilst driving along Park Blvd towards a campsite at Jumbo Rocks. The stark, eroded adobe walls of the main ranch house have some kind of eerie allure that has drawn me to visit them many times since that first encounter.
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Johnny Lang first saw Lost Horse Valley in 1890, when he and his father dove a herd of cattle into the area and set up camp. One morning, they awoke to find their horses gone. Johnny tracked them to the McHaney brothers’ (local cattle rustlers) camp. The McHaneys informed Johnny the horses weren’t there and he’d better leave the area. Some time later, Johnny met up with a man named “Dutch” Frank. Now Dutch had a rich mining claim, but was afraid to work it because of the McHaney boys. So he sold the claim to Johnny and his father for $1,000 and they named it the Lost Horse mine.
Read MoreJoshua Tree National Park, the California Gold Country, forgotten places in the Mojave Desert. These are a few of my favorite things.
