Dale Mining District
Recently I enjoyed a great expedition into the mountains of the old Dale mining district near Twenty-Nine Palms, California. It's a rough area near the Pinto Basin in the eastern side of the Joshua Tree National Park full of old gold and silver mines (a few still worked by people) that you can visit if you have a good 4x4 and a short wheel-base, like a jeep. It gets plenty rocky going up a few of the goat trails that pass for roads back in there.
Here's a picture of the desert blogger mobile as we set off on the dirt road that leads into the mountains in the distance to begin our journey:
The road quickly turned into a trek up and we started to pass a few remains of old mining camps and dumps. I picked up a few old rusted tin cans for my garden's rock wall in the backyard.
Below you can see the flat square area where a mill once sat to crush the ore and load it into carts.
We traversed some narrow canyons and made our way up stream beds full of jagged rocks.
We had a seista in an old mine building (which I didn't take snaps of, d'oh) and then continued on our way. There was a lot of old junked equipment and vehicles along the trail to show that in the past there had been a lot of mining activity going on back in these forgotten hills...
I'll post pictures of some of the stuff we saw in the coming days.
To be continued:
DB
Posted: Tuesday 28th March 2006, 12:37 PM
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