Day 23: Gold Mining around Metaline Falls

August 7: I woke up and hit the trail with a normal 6:00am start time. The trail today followed Noisy Creek downstream for several miles to Sullivan Lake, dropping a couple of thousand feet in elevation along the way.

At the lake was a paid campground where I was able to throw out my trash and use the pit toilets before I continued onward along the length of Sullivan Lake.

Sullivan Lake

At the far end of Sullivan Lake, the trail merged onto roads that would lead the last 8 miles into the small town of Metaline Falls. First it followed gravel roads, but that section didn't last for more than a mile or so. Then it was paved roads the rest of the way into town.

About halfway through the road walk, I stopped at a small pullout next to Sullivan Creek. There were some large boulders I could sit on, and it was in the shade--shade was essential for such a hot day! And I noticed a weird-looking contraption on the other side of the creek. It was resting on the far shore and it looked like a small boat, but so small I couldn't imagine that anyone would fit into it easily.

Then I realized that contraption at the back looked like a sluice box. And if that was a sluice box, then it must be a dredge for mining gold! Was there gold mining out here?! There was no one around the presumed dredge, but I felt absolutely certain that that was a gold mining dredge. I had no idea that there was gold mining in Washington state!

This looked like a gold mining dredge on the far shore! There was gold out here?!

About a half hour later, an older man walked up on the road. He had a long, graying beard, leathery skin and I guessed he was maybe 60 years old. He wore a bluish T-shirt and beige shorts that looked well-worn and gave off a homeless vibe. Not that that's a criticism--I too was giving off a homeless vibe, no doubt! And he wore a handgun on his hip.

It seemed like a total stereotype but the first thought that popped into my head was: This guy looks like a gold miner!

It might have been a stereotype, but I was also right. That was his dredge on the other side of the creek and he was camped out at a pullout on the road just ahead. We chatted for several minutes and I asked him about his dredge and gold mining in general--mostly because I was just curious. I'd never run into an actual gold miner on my adventures!

He said he spent 7 hours yesterday working with the dredge and getting down to the bedrock (where the gold was located) was the hard part. I asked if it was okay to ask how much gold he found--I didn't want to be rude if that's a touchy subject, but how could I not be curious?! And he pulled out a vile with flecks of gold. It was, he told me, what he had found yesterday. It didn't look like much, and I asked how much it was worth. "Maybe $20 or so."

This is what $20 of gold and 7 hours of work look like.

Yeah, not worth much. Not a lot of money for 7 hours of presumably brutal work under a hot sun. Definitely not a career I wanted to get in--although it might be fun to gold mine for a couple of hours just as a novelty. And he needed a gun to protect himself from someone wanting to rob him of $20 of gold? Well, maybe yesterday was a bad day and normally he had more gold on him. Maybe....? I don't think knocking over gold miners would probably net much money. Not out here, at least!

I wanted to take a photo of his gold, but he said I should really go out in the sun for the photo because it really sparkled well in the sun. I so didn't want to go out in the sun, but I did anyhow and the gold positively glittered! Very pretty. I could see why people would be enchanted with the stuff.

I also asked if he was the only person mining for gold or if there were others and he said there were others. It didn't sound like there were a lot of others, but he wasn't alone. His friend, he told me, had found a "picker" yesterday. He said it as if it was the biggest news to hit the region in years.

I was fascinated. In return, he was curious about us PNT hikers. He already knew I was thru-hiking the PNT--he's seen PNT hikers pass by for years and knew what we were doing out there, so his questions were more about the route of the trail. What towns did it go through, what passes did it cross over. That sort of thing. He knew the trail went through Northport and wanted to know how it got from here to Northport.

Eventually our conversation ran out and he left. He waded across the creek to his dredge and started walking it downstream to his campsite just out of view.

There wasn't much of a shoulder to walk on during the last few curves of the road into Metaline Falls.

I picked up my pack and continued on toward Metaline Falls. The road walk, despite being paved, wasn't too horrible since it wasn't very busy. That is... until the trail merged onto Highway 31. That highway was a very busy road and a little scary to walk on. The last part into town, the road snaked around blind curves with almost no shoulder. That was the scariest part, and whenever I approached those areas I'd look for a break in the traffic then dash through the curve as quickly as possible.

I made it into Metaline Falls at about 2:00 in the afternoon. The thermometer outside the hotel read 85 degrees when I arrived--and temperatures were still rising. They typically peaked at around 4:00 in the afternoon and by 5:00, it would start cooling again. Ugh... so freaking hot!

It was about 85 degrees (in the shade!) when I arrived in town.... and still heating up!

I checked into the Washington Hotel. The historic hotel was built in 1910 and, although primitive by modern times, was absolutely charming with period furniture and decor. The hotel was mostly full when I arrived--filled with construction workers working on a nearby project. Included as part of the price for the room, Tiffany gave me a scoop of ice cream from the store downstairs. On a hot day like today, it was heaven!

I was the only hiker there, but they had a hiker box that I checked out.

And... I was intrigued by the two bear sprays that were left there. Were they left by hikers who quit the trail here? Hikers who decided that they didn't need no stupid bear spray slowing them down anymore? Or were they left by hikers who felt that it wasn't needed anymore now that we were getting outside of grizzly country? Officially, my maps still said we were in grizzly country, but we were definitely at the outside range where they could possibly been seen.

But there were a couple of thoughts that floated through my head about the bear spray. Almost everyone thru-hiking this trail hikes from east to west. It's how the maps and guidebooks are labeled and its extremely unlikely that any hiker who had hiked this far would suddenly need bear spray. The bear spray would probably sit here for decades to come!

And my other thought--even if someone did have a use for bear spray--should they rely on a can of it that may or may not be full? There was no way to tell if the bear spray might have been used and if your life depends on it, do you want a can that might be half full?

I wouldn't! But it gave me an idea. I could take a can for myself and just shoot it off in the woods. Shoot off the whole can! I had sprayed the can I carried for a half-second just to get a sense of how it worked, but now I could test a can and empty the entire thing! It's supposed to last at least 7 seconds... but does it really? It's supposed to shoot 30-odd feet... but does it really? I could find out! I could test it!

I grabbed one of the cans for myself. I'd never shoot off my own can just for fun--these things were $30+ and I didn't want to waste the money. Well, I had thought about shooting my can off in four years when it reached its expiration date, but now I didn't have to wait for four years!

The historic Washington Hotel was built in 1910 and was absolutely charming!

Eventually I headed back outside. I ate lunch at the 5th Avenue Bar and Grill--an unassuming place with overpriced food. The food was okay--not great, but okay--but they charged prices like it was great food. Afterwards, I still felt a little hungry and headed to the nearby market to do some grocery shopping.

I also ran into Ryan who had arrived into Metaline Falls earlier in the morning. He didn't make it here last night like he had wanted to and was planning to camp in the yard of a trail angel for free which is why I didn't see him at the hotel. I was tired of camping, though, and preferred the comforts of indoor when I was in town. I suspected his budget for the PNT was smaller than mine as well, but I still had an income even while I was hiking--a luxury that most people did not get.

I checked the thermometer outside the hotel at 8:00 in the evening and it was now reading 90 degrees. Ugh! How hot had it gotten earlier in the day? Temperatures had already been cooling for over 3 hours and it was still 90 degrees out! So miserably hot....

There was no air-conditioning at the hotel, which isn't a surprise for a building built in 1910, but there was a fan in my room that I was happy to use and I opened the window to let in air, but the room was still uncomfortably warm and I sweat buckets just laying in bed.

I eventually headed off to sleep, but temperatures were not supposed to improve over the next several days. In fact, tomorrow's forecast showed that Metaline Falls was expected to break 100 degrees tomorrow. Ugh! I needed to get an early morning start tomorrow, and the earlier, the better!

Sullivan Lake

And the 8-mile road walk into town begins!

Just 7 more miles to go! I was also amused to see the sign for a "public phone" to the left. Do those still exist?! Apparently so! But they're so unusual, they have to post signs to help you find them.

Sullivan Creek--there is gold in that thar creek!

I felt right at home! =)

Day 7: Kentucky Camp and the Gold Mines

Sunrise! A glorious sunrise!

April 19: Arizona is well-known for it's mineral deposits--especially copper. But there is also gold in them thar hills, and the Santa Rita Mountains have it. One popular way to get to gold back in the day was hydraulic mining where powerful jets of water blast away hillsides to reach the gold deposits. It still happens even today, at least in some places, but the wholesale slaughter of mountains probably isn't as common anymore. But even low-tech gold mining generally required some water. Panning for gold isn't easy if there's no water around!

But in Arizona, water was often in short supply. In these mountains, the gold deposits and ample water did not occur in the same valleys. There are two solutions to this problem: carrying the pay dirt to water, or hauling the water to pay dirt. When gold mining started in these hills in the 1870s, burros packed water to the mining claims which was sold to miners for 3 cents a gallon. I have a hunch that the folks hauling water to the miners probably earned more money than the miners did!

But this was a slow process that didn't scale up very well, and in stepped James B. Stetson in 1904. He was an engineer for the Santa Rita Water and Mining Company, and he pushed an idea to make hydraulic mining a reality. The company would build ditches, pipes and tunnels to carry water from streams and springs near Bear Spring to the gold-bearing gravels at Boston Gulch.

The 1,000-foot tunnel I camped near overnight wasn't the the first evidence of this elaborate aqueduct. The Arizona Trail follows on and along the 8.5 miles of this system. The ditch that carried water 2.5 miles to this location wasn't readily apparently anymore, although I did spy a couple of clearly man-made structures made of rocks and concrete that I suspect were part of the ditch. No signage near them explained their purpose, though, so I only had guesses and hunches. The tunnel, however, had a plaque which explained much about the details. Even better, the trail would pass about half a dozen of these informational signs, and I took photos of them all so I could tell the gold stories in detail later. =)

That's where all of this information comes from. No Google searches needed!

The next historical sign was posted at Stetson's Dam, or at least what's left of it. The miners needed a place to store the thousands of gallons of water that hydraulic mining required, so they build a dam 10 feet high and 100 feet long. Today, it's just a long mound of earth and rocks and holds back no water at all.

See the water cache hidden behind the tree?

The next structure to be featured was the penstock with an intriguing sign about "Making Water Flow Uphill." The sign explained:

From the upper parts of Gardner and Cave Canyons, water flowed gently in open ditches to this point, dropping only about 15 feet per mile. But from here the Santa Rita Water and Mining Company needed to get the water across the broad valley to the northeast.

To do so, the company laid a 24-inch diameter pipe. From this penstock the pipeline drops more than 200 vertical feet to the stream crossing, then gains 160 feet to the ridgetop 1 mile northeast of here.

Because the water entered the pipe higher than the outlet, no pumping was required to make the water flow up the opposite hillside.

The penstock was the structure where water flowed out of the ditch and into the pipe, and the sign included a cut-away diagram of its design. Bars at the entrance blocked larger debris from entering the pipe, and a settling tank at one end helped to remove dirt, leaves and smaller debris before the water finally entered the pipe. It was important to get all of this debris out of the water before sending it down 200 feet through the pipe and back up 160 feet to the outlet. It wouldn't have any trouble flowing downhill, but the debris would have trouble making it back up the 160 feet to the outlet!

A hatch at the top of the penstock allowed workers access to occasionally clear the settling tank of debris.

I checked out the penstock, taking photos of the entrance where water flowed from the ditch into the penstock and through the old hatch into the settling tank, then continued following the aqueduct.

Along this next stretch, I'd often see the 24-inch pipe partly exposed. Sometimes it would cross the trail perpendicularly. And then it had to cross bedrock, for which they provided another explanatory sign. This ground contained some very hard limestone. Most of the pipe was buried so the surrounding dirt could help support the weight of the water in the pipe, but here the construction workers found it easier to elevate the pipe on a massive rock masonry platform than to excavate into the bedrock. Masonry held the pipe in place while short, wooden trestles carried the pipe across small drainages.

Wildflowers of the Arizona Trail!

The masonry was still visible here, although the pipe was long gone.

Further along the trail, another information board explained the small-scale mining techniques that were used before this aqueduct was built. Miners used picks and shovels to dig small shafts down to the "pay dirt," the gold-bearing gravels just above bedrock. The worthless dirt above the gold-bearing gravels were cast aside to form heaps and piles in the area.

I looked around and saw a lot of heaps and piles. Were all of those the leftover worthless dirt from small-scale mining? That's would have been a heck of a lot of dirt to pile up using nothing more than picks and shovels! The heaps and piles looked like they'd been there forever--I wouldn't have given them a second thought if the sign hadn't made me stop to look at them more closely. They did have something of a symmetrical look to them, more than I would have expected to find naturally. After over a hundred years, though, they had grown grasses and shrubs and generally blended in with the environment around it.

The trail continued onward, finally reaching Kentucky Camp. The camp was built as the headquarters for the Santa Rita Water and Mining Company. The aqueduct worked, and hydraulic mining started in 1904. Three hydraulic monitors--essentially giant squirt guns that shot a pressurized stream of water 100 feet through the air--started their assault on the nearby hills. The Arizona Daily Star reported on August 24th of that year that the monitors "tear up the ground with splendid results."

In May of 1905, James Stetson died when he fell from a third-story hotel window in Tucson. George B. McAneny, the president and primary investor, was unable to continue his financial support and died a few years later in 1909. Ultimately, the operation lasted a mere six months and after spending over $200,000 building the aqueduct, it only pulled out a few thousand dollars of gold. The operation was a miserable failure.

After McAneny died, Louis Hummel acquired the property and used Kentucky Camp as a ranch headquarters until the 1960s. The camp, along with most of the Greaterville mining district, then became part of the Coronado National Forest in 1989 where things stand today.

Lest you think nothing happened today except following in the footsteps of old gold miners, you're largely correct. Not much else happened today. =)

All that's left of Stetson's 10-foot high, 100-foot long dam.

I did run into not one, but two backpackers during the day. The first, Day Hiker, was hiking southbound on the Arizona Trail. He had started his hike somewhere near Phoenix and wasn't staying exclusive to the Arizona Trail having wandered out on the Grand Enchantment Trail for quite a ways and looping around to all sorts of places I'd never heard about. I suspected his trail name of Day Hiker was due to his small pack--it looked like he could have been out for a day hike!

The second hiker I met called himself Whitney Houston. I was curious about what kind of self-respecting man would call himself Whitney Houston and where that trail name came from, but I didn't ask. =) He was hiking northbound on the Arizona Trail having started at the Mexican border but intended to stop at the Grand Canyon rather than continue on to the end of the trail.

"But why not do that last hundred miles?" I asked. "If you have the time, you may as well!"

But he told me that he wanted to end at a grand location, and what was more grand than the Grand Canyon? He had me there.... "But you'd be so close to the end of the trail by then!"

The part that really shocked me, however, was that he had started at the Mexican border just two days earlier. It took me a week to reach this location, and he covered the distance in two days! He was doing over 40 miles per day! Insane! And that he expected to reach the Grand Canyon on May 9th or 10th. I figured to be around the halfway mark on the trail by then.

I took this photo the day before. At the
time I took it, I recognized it as being man-made
(that crack in the rock looked a little too straight!)
but I couldn't figure out what it was for until
learned about the gold mining aqueduct. Now
I think it was part of the ditch that used to
carry water to the tunnel.

"Well, I guess I'll never see you again!" Most of the time, when I see long-distance hikers headed in the same direction as me, I know I might see them over and over again, passing each other multiple times. But there was no way in hell I'd be hiking 40 miles per day. Even if I could (and I probably could--if I really wanted to), I had to take photos for every mile of the trail for Walking 4 Fun and therefore couldn't hike through the night like he must have been doing.

I didn't know it at the time, but Whitney Houston would be the closest thing to a thru-hiker I'd meet along the entire length of the Arizona Trail. Technically, he wasn't a thru-hiker since he wasn't planning to walk the last 100 or so miles of the trail, but he would be the only hiker I'd meet that was doing more than half of the trail, and Day Hiker and Whitney Houston were the only two long-distance hikers I'd meet on the trail at all. The only other backpackers I'd meet for the rest of the trail would just be out for overnight or a weekend trips.

But I didn't know that at the time. I thought this was just the beginning of the long-distance hikers I'd be meeting on the trail--not the last of them!

Once I reached Kentucky Camp, the trail follows a series of dirt roads that were shared with more than a few ATVers. But it was Saturday--the roads that allowed motorized vehicles were probably busier on weekends.

Late in the day, the clouds started coming in thick and thunder roared in the distance. Rain seemed like a real possibility. I set up camp next to Forest Service Road 62--which turned out to be a remarkably busy road for being gravel. Seemed like a vehicle would drive down it every ten minutes or so until just after sunset. I set up my tarp again, just in case it rained during the night. It did sprinkle lightly near dusk as I cooked dinner, but nothing more than a light sprinkle.

Entrance to the penstock where water would flow from
a ditch (which I would have been standing in) into
a pipe going out the other end.

Looking through the hatch at the top of the penstock into the settling tank.

There is gold in them thar hills!

The clouds not only made a nice backdrop for my photos,
but it also provided a lot of shade on this otherwise
mostly unshaded area. =)

This 24-inch pipe was used to make water flow uphill. =)

Masonry was used to support the pipe in areas where engineers decided
it was too difficult to dig into the hard limestone.

This illustration on one of the informational signposts shows how the pipe
would have crossed a small creek on a trestle.

Ocotillo

Some of the "heaps and piles" of waste dirt from small-scale mining.

One of the three monitors that used to "tear up the ground with splendid results."

I take a break on the porch of the main building at Kentucky Ranch.
Notice that I took off my hiking shoes and put on my crocs. I made myself
quite comfortable here! =)

There is lodging available at Kentucky Camp, but be sure to read
the small print. It's a Bed and NO breakfast!

Ruins at Kentucky Camp.

We've come 79.1 miles since leaving the Mexican border!

I really love the sky in this photo!

Several people in ATVs and other vehicles passed me along this stretch of the trail.

It would seem that there is still some small-scale mining going on around
these parts, but I didn't actually see anyone mining--just the mining claims!

Did you hear that? I heard thunder.... Despite the sliver of sunshine
still glowing on the distant peaks, rain appears to be imminent!

An ATV drives by on Forest Service Road 62.

I set up my tarp using this fence to prop up one side. Hopefully
lightning won't strike the barbed-wire fence. =) That's
the same forest service road as before in the background.