Nevada Triangle, Death Valley National Park, March/April, 2000

[Sagebrush Reconnoiterer]

A three day, two night adventure in the Nevada Triangle section of Death Valley National Park, west and northwest of Beatty, Nevada, March 31-April 2, 2000.

Places visited:
* Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad
* Homestead Mine
* Phinney Mine
* Strozzi Ranch
* Currie Well
* Happy Holligan Mine

 

[rubberlegs]

We just enjoyed a trip in the Nevada triangle a few days ago. My better half is giving a talk any day now on the CA/NV border, quite a story with camels and crazy people, etc.*, so we went up to Lees Camp area and walked the border for a ways. Then tried driving up towards Inyo Mine. Now that's a rough road -- too rough for us. But we got high enough we could walk it to the pass the next day. There's some neato terrain there.

* The border from the Colorado River to Lake Tahoe wasn't fully official until 1980, but her story is from about 1860.

 

[Sagebrush Reconnoiterer]

Hi Steve. If your better half needs some additional research material, you might see if you can find copes of THE ALBUM: TIMES & TALES OF INYO-MONO, Volume II numbers 1 and 2. There are two parts to a lengthy article about the entire effort to established the border between Tahoe and the Colorado, including the von Schmidt effort. It was written by Thomas M. Little, Ph.D.

Edit: I found both entire issues online at:

http://www.owensvalleyhistory.com/stories/the_album_1989_jan_compressed.pdf

http://www.owensvalleyhistory.com/stories/the_album_1989_april_compressed.pdf

THE ALBUM was a quarterly published in the latter half of the 1980s to around 1996 by Chalfant Press in Bishop. Chalfant was the publisher of the regional newspapers, books and The Album. The books and Album ceased publication when Scripps purchased Chalfant around 1996. I was a regular contributor beginning in 1989 through the publications end.

 

[Sagebrush Reconnoiterer]

... so we went up to Lees Camp area and walked the border for a ways. Then tried driving up towards Inyo Mine. Now that's a rough road -- too rough for us. But we got high enough we could walk it to the pass the next day. There's some neato terrain there.

I camped at Lee in 1999 and hiked the road to the summit, where the site of the mining camp of Echo sits. Explored all three townsites of Lee, California, Lee Annex (straddling the border) and Lee, Nevada. The road over the Funeral Range and down Echo Canyon is for serious off road vehicles only due to rock dry falls and the like.

 

[rubberlegs]

Hi Steve. If your better half needs some additional research material, you might see if you can find copes of THE ALBUM: TIMES & TALES OF INYO-MONO, Volume II numbers 1 and 2.

Well those are fascinating articles. I forwarded them to Deb! Thanks.

And you hiked farther from Lee than we did. There are more mine claims in that area up high then I've seen almost anywhere. Most just seemed like rock cairns with little actual diggin'. Deb was hoping to figure out how the early boundary party got through the Funeral Mtns to find water. They were desperate.

Back to the boundary: we walked a ways each way from the park boundary, also the CA/NV boundary and found numerous cairns. With our fancy shmancy GPS receiving devices, we could tell some of the cairns were on one side or the other, and some were pretty close to each other. We wonder if those were from separate surveying parties, with varying accuracy.

That reminds me of the two fire lookouts at Monument 83 on the Washington/British Columbia border. Apparently one U.S. lookout was just across the border, so they built another one on the correct side. We kinda think they were both on the same side, as we stared at GPS receivers looking for 49.0000000000000 degrees.