Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada

Valley of Fire State Park is a surprise of a gem tucked away in the desert 50+ miles from Las Vegas, Nevada.  Here you will find a variety of natural wonders including petroglyphs, petrified logs, Rainbow Vista, Seven Sisters, White Domes, Arch Rock, Atlatl Rock, and the Beehives.  Valley of Fire was named for its vivid red sandstone uplifted 150 million years ago.  Temperatures are usually mild, but can go from freezing in winter usually without snow, up to 120 degrees in the summer.

The first inhabitants were the Basket Maker Indians beginning 300 B.C. followed by the Anasazi Indians who farmed the area to 1150 A.D.  These ancient occupants loved to draw and left behind stunning petroglyphs sprinkled all over the red sandstone walls which are amazing to see today.  Don, Dani, Josh and I, enjoyed a long walk through the canyon and climbed the walls for exercise and found petroglyphs and watering holes.

If you are not into hiking up canyons, there are other fine features in the park such as Atlatl Rock that you can drive right up to and it has its own campground.  Near there is a two mile loop drive that goes to to Arch Rock and Piano Rock along with impressive valley views.  The Beehives are unusual formations carved by wind, water and time.

There are also petrified logs survived from an ancient forest and located in two places in the park.  If you like grand views you will want to see Rainbow Vista named for the colored sandstone view.  The ultimate in red rock formations can easily be seen at Seven Sisters, while White Domes offer an impressive bright contrast in sandstone.

Walking through Valley of Fire is like hitting the jackpot in geological terms, and you didn’t even have to go to Vegas to find it.

Fee:  $6 Entry, $14 Entry/Camping

Let’s go!

Echo Canyon and Inyo Mine, Death Valley, California

It’s now 2010 and only 105 years since the inception of the Inyo Mine in Echo Canyon of Death Valley National Park, California.  In January 1905, two prospectors named Maroni Hicks and Chet Leavitt made the mine discovery in Echo Canyon.  By March the two men returned loaded with provisions and took out more claims in the area.  In May the men had twenty claims and began to dig a tunnel in June on one of them.  By summer the Hick and Leavitt property was the most prominent and talked about in the Echo-Lee District.

Hicks and Leavitt were able to convince investors to go in on their purchase of the Inyo Mine.  The capitalists were interested and by August nine of their 20 claims were bonded to Mr. Tasker L. Oddie for $150,000 and Mr. Charles Schwab for the remainder for $100,000.  The arrangement was for Mr. Schwab to pay the prospectors $5,000 on September 1^st, if he was to move forward with the purchase of the gold mine.  Mr. Oddie was to pay $5,000 on December 1^st with the remainder paid in one year.

Schwab never did pay his portion and never tried to develop any plans.  Mr. Oddie did move forward and his men began working the Inyo Mine.  The men soon developed a deep shaft that went 50 feet down.  The farther down the miners went in the mine the more ambitious their plans grew.  Talk began of the development of a mill with a tramway and electrical power plant to cut off the presently used 35 mile drive to Rhyolite, Nevada.  The present road was so winding, Mr. Oddie highly considered constructing the new wagon road to Rhyolite even at a cost of $1,500.  The road never materialized when Mr. Oddie let his option expire in November due to a misunderstanding of the terms.

The Inyo Mine claims were then bonded to two Colorado capitalists for a payment of $10,000 to be paid upfront with the balance of $140,000 due later that year.  The deal was never sealed when the Colorado men were unable to raise the cash or refused to move forward in their option.

The Inyo Gold Mining Company was sold in December to Utah promoters L. Holbrook and associates.  The company sold stock for $1 each, with a capitalization of $1,000,000.  By March the mine was 100 feet deep and employed nine men.  Chet Leavitt retained his interests in the mine and served as VP of the company, and directed the mining operations.

By June, the Rhyolite Herald newspaper hailed a big gold strike at the Inyo Mine.  When the blistering heat of the summer months set in, virtually all mining work ceased at the mine when temps could rise as high as 120 degrees.  By 1906 no shipments were made when work progressed slowly although a new 73 foot shaft was completed.

When the mine reopened in 1907 three new shafts at depths of 100, 73 and 30 feet had been tunneled out.  Chet Leavitt was still working the mine directing all operations as superintendent.  By February 20 men were working the mine.  A commissary store was in the works.  Water was now hauled 8 miles away from Furnace Creek.  The town kept growing to support the growing number of miners working the Inyo Gold Mine.  A new boarding house and commissary for groceries was built.  The local newspapers wrote about the boom in the new gold fields along the Nevada-California border.  The town continued to grow until the Panic of 1907 set in and forced the Inyo Gold Mine into bankruptcy.

We were just at the Inyo Gold Mine in late 2009.  It is interesting to see that a little over one hundred years later, we as a nation, are in another financial crisis.  Guess it’s true that history does repeat itself.  Regardless of whether you know the history of Inyo Mine or not, it’s still worth a visit.  But be forewarned, the road is bumpy and requires a four-wheel drive vehicle.

Let’s go!

Rhyolite Ghost Town, Nevada

The charm of Rhyolite in the state of Nevada has always made it one of our favorite ghost town destinations.  Don and I have been going there for decades.  We have taken the kids many times when they were younger. It was to their surprise when we were getting closer to the town that they remembered the place.  We could hear the enthusiasm in their voices as the memories came flooding in.

Rhyolite has changed a lot since the first time we ever saw it.  The ghost town remains in its’ own little world, with hardly any new buildings or amenities surrounding the once active gold rush activities of its heyday.  The few remaining ruins look like something more out of a movie set than real.  The building facades are about all that remain in a few structures.  The school is still intact thanks to the Friends of Rhyolite who have done restorations to slow down the decay.  They have even put up a few signs to call out the remaining ruins.

The best building is the Train Station which is privately owned and now has chain linked fencing around the facility.  In the midst of the gold rush era, it was common to take down buildings, or move them, or reuse the building materials, when new mines struck it rich, or when old mines were depleted or stopped producing.  Legend has it that the old town buildings of Rhyolite became the new foundation for the town of Beatty in Nevada, when Rhyolite went bust.  But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.  This is how the actual town of Rhyolite came about.

When a well-known gold prospector in Death Valley, California, named Shorty Harris and his friend E. L. Cross were prospecting in the nearby Nevada area in 1904, they found quartz all over a hill. Shorty described the scene as “… the quartz was just full of free gold…”

Only one other person lived in the area at that time.  He was known as Old Man Beatty who lived in a ranch with his family five miles away.  Shorty and E.L.’s discovery was all it took and word spread quickly.  The gold rush was on. Soon there were 2000 claims in a 30 mile area.

The most promising, the Montgomery Shoshone mine, prompted everyone to move to Rhyolite, named from its silica-rich volcanic rock. The town boomed. Buildings sprang up everywhere. But this was not just a mining town, it was a significant town.  One building was 3 stories tall and cost $90,000 to build.  A stock exchange and Board of Trade were formed. The red light district drew women from as far away as San Francisco. There were hotels, stores, and a school for 250 children (which still stands to this day), an ice plant, two electric plants, foundries and machine shops, and even a miner’s union hospital.

The town citizens had an active social life including baseball games, dances, basket socials, whist parties, tennis, a symphony, Sunday school picnics, basketball games, Saturday night variety shows at the opera house and pool tournaments.

In 1906 Countess Morajeski opened the Alaska Glacier Ice Cream Parlor to the delight of the local citizenry. That same year an enterprising miner, Tom T. Kelly, built a Bottle House out of 50,000 beer and liquor bottles.  The Bottle House still stands to this day and is one of the most viable attractions in all of Rhyolite.

In April 1907 electricity even came to Rhyolite, and by August of that year a mill had been constructed to handle 300 tons of ore a day at the Montgomery Shoshone mine. It consisted of a crusher, 3 giant rollers, over a dozen cyanide tanks and a reduction furnace.

The Montgomery Shoshone mine had become nationally known because promoter Bob Montgomery once boasted he could take $10,000 a day in ore from the mine. Learning this part of the history of Rhyolite made our entire family laugh out loud.  For decades Don and I have known a caver named Bob Montgomery, whom is actually our best caver friend to this day.  So it was funny to us to learn someone with his same name was responsible for the fame of Rhyolite’s most productive mine, and not because of his boasting, but because it did out-produce them all.

The Montgomery Shoshone mine was later owned by Charles Schwab, who purchased it in 1906 for a reported 2 million dollars. The financial panic of 1907 took its toll on Rhyolite and was seen as the beginning of the end for the town.  The town and its people may be gone, but the history and its mines live on.

Let’s go!