Death Valley is one of the first National Parks I ever went to, and almost immediately I fell in love — it’s vast, beautiful, and eerily silent — filled with history and natural wonder. But also, apparently, thousands of death traps.
According to an LA Times article (with some pretty great pics, too), the Park has anywhere between 10,000 to 50,000 dangerous mines and mining areas, ranging from sinkholes to crumbling support beams in tunnels to giant vertical shafts, covered in sand and rusty wire. And while most accessible mines have giant danger signs warning anyone who comes near them, those same mines are often marked on maps and have clear trails leading to them.
Why aren’t they all closed up and safe? Well, there is some historical value to keeping them around, but the main reason, of course, is money.
The financially strapped National Park Service estimates the total cost of making mines safe at about $233 million, with an immediate need for $60 million. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation to establish a cleanup fund by requiring all hard-rock mining firms operating on public land to pay a 4% royalty on existing operations and 8% on new ones.
The inspector general recommended that parks request enough money to mitigate the worst sites and share resources to shore up their programs for abandoned mines.
There are also a ton of mines, shafts, and tunnels in the Angeles National Forest – from its pre-Federal Land history. Dozens are visible on the East Fork Trail, as well as the fairly accessible Dawn Mine near the Echo Mountain trail. I never go in ‘em, mainly because I’m a stickler for safety and kind of terrified of them — but does anyone out there have any good mine stories?
Preferably ones that don’t involve someone getting killed.
Also — man, I have to get back to Death Valley soon …
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Yeah, my brother Desertphile has a map that he’s been building on which lists the GPS location of about 200 mines since he’s walked or crawled across the desert from muddy seep to muddy seep.
Most are located in areas that are rare for humans to visit but some — such as around the old Excelsior Mine off of Cima — are routinely visited by humans and those are deep shafts that go hundreds of feet down, some of which used to be covered by a sheet of plywood but which have rotted away.
There are also some mines that had for a time water coming out of them which carried off in to the soil horrible toxins including arsnic and mercury. People can walk through the drift outflows that are all dried up today and the next day have horrible headaches because of the crap they asperated or picked up on their legs, arms, or face.
The BLM doesn’t know where all of the old mines are and even prospects where nothing was found and no claims were recorded can be extremly deep.
All part of the adventure of walking off in to the desert. }:-}
Kind of related, my brother and I were coming back from spending time at Tacopa Springs (wondering if the local homosexual motorbiker gangs were going to kill us most of the time) and we took Basin on the way back in to the stinking cities.
Talk about desert mine stories and the dangers, there are a lot of people who walk off into the desert or drive off in to the desert who shouldn’t be there, and one of the old codgers at Baker had been telling us about some of the things he’s seen people do so it was a coincidence what we encountered out on Basin.
A van full of people had flown in to Las Vegas from Japan, rented the van, and then had decided they would see something of the desert. They drove South toward California and for whatever reason decided to take Basin.
They drove out and out, having a hard time of it but just stupidly kept going. By the time they hit the Union Pacific railroad tracks they thought it was too dangerous to cross the tracks — and really there was no safe place to — so they hung a left and paralleled the tracks.
By the time they got bogged down and stuck solid, they finally realized they were in trouble. They had no water, it was just abbove freezing at night, and they were far beyond the reach of cell telephones. Any hope of walking out would have been a couple of days of hot desert day followed by freezing desert night.
On occasion one of their cell phones would get a signal bar and they would be treated to a brief dial tome where they would try to call for emergency help and then get bounced off the cell tower as conditions came and went.
When my brother and I drove near them in my brothers really old light pickup truck, they frantically waved us down. My brother hoppped out with his entrenching tool and started digging them out of the sand and we got to listen to their stupidity.
With the wheels uncovered and the chassis elivated off of the ground we put a chain to their vehicle and dragged them on to firmer ground, then we continued on our way, figuring that if they didn’t turn around and head back to Las Vegas, they probably deserved to die.
Walking off in to old mines is kind of the same, it seems to me. Pretty stupid, and people damn well know that they should not be going in to them but they do it anyway.