Abandoned Mines and Ghost Towns

We took a drive out toward the Northeast side of the park yesterday. There were a couple of hikes there we wanted to check out. The first we came to was the Keane Wonder Mine. It required driving out three miles of dirt road. Mike was very brave this time. I took more pictures than this one, but it will give you the "big picture" of what the place looked like. When we get back to internet access civilization, I'll tell you more about it and post some more pictures. For now, be careful here because I haven't yet told you all the ways you could die out here.

The second hike was kind of a bust. It wasn't far, but the ghost town of Keane Springs pretty much no longer exists. And, again, I'll say more about that when I can show you more pictures.

After the second hike, we decided to drive into Beatty, Nevada, just outside the national park boundary. We were hoping to find a grocery store, but no dice. Also, we wanted to fill our fuel tank. Diesel within the national park is nearly $6.00 per gallon. In Beatty, we found it for $3.09. When your gas tank is 48 gallons, that is a significant savings.

Along the way, we passed the road out to Rhyolite Ghost Town. You can see where it is indicated with an arrow in the image below.

I was sure and certain I'd written about Rhyolite on this blog. After an exhaustive search (meaning, I was exhausted), I could find nothing about it. Checking through old picture files, indeed, we visited Rhyolite pre-blogging days. So that's okay...I will resurrect those old pictures and tell you about it in a future post. Instead, I'm recycling an old post from our visit to The Racetrack Playa here in Death Valley. It's one of the more interesting and mysterious features of the park. Along the way, you'll see Tea Kettle Junction, a monument to the American sense of humor. So...here goes. I hope you'll enjoy this post written March 15, 2011.

It is thirty miles over a rough gravel road to reach the Racetrack.  What makes it so interesting is that there are moving rocks on the playa.  No one has ever seen them move, but it is clear that they do.  (You'll see in a moment.)  The prevailing theory is that the movement happens when rain slicks the clay playa surface, and then wind moves them along.  It seems plausible to me.  This is what the surface looks like when it's dry.

 

The first thing you come to on the road is Teakettle Junction.  If you've ever seen a shoe tree (a tree with shoes on it), then you'll understand Teakettle Junction.  Other things have been found there too, like a broken laptop computer.  We saw only teakettles, and what a lot of teakettles there were!

Aren't these so funny?  I love it when our collective sense of humor shows.

Nine miles later, one begins to see the formation known as The Grandstand.  This is how it looks from a distance.

And this is what it looks as you walk up to it.  It's big!

It reminded me of a rocky outcropping in the ocean with waves washing up on the shore.

The rocks fall off of this outcropping.  The ones that are moving and leaving trails behind them are quite some distance away--driving distance--from the outcropping.  They've moved quite a distance just to be located where they are, and then they leave these long tracks as they skid along the playa's surface.

Cool, huh?  I sort of like this lightening bolt trail:

So that was pretty much all we did in our three days in Death Valley.  We saw very few flowers, but the creosote bushes were blooming.  We'd never seen that before that I can recall.

Everything growing seemed green and healthy, and so the bloom is still coming.  I think we were just too early for it. 

So we're back to the present now. No plans for today beyond relaxing. We have at least two more nights here in Death Valley, and then we have some thoughts about where we'll go next. More about that we we make up our minds.