In 1936, two young men from a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, Rockey Cochran and Farland Wells, followed a local Indian named Tom Wilson up a nameless side canyon in the Panamint Mountains. Wilson led them to a cluster of dark lava boulders near a seep on the canyon's western slope. Scratched into the rock alongside ancient petroglyphs were the letters "W.B.R." and the year "1849." It looked like proof that the Jayhawkers, a group of 49ers who had passed through this canyon on their escape from Death Valley, had left their mark almost ninety years earlier. The spring was given its name on the spot. But there's a problem with the story, and it starts with a simple question: would a starving man stop to carve his initials?
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Sally Ann Mine
Unknown to most people, there used to be a mining camp at the southeast corner of the Racetrack. A cabin and two enclosed yards belonging to the Sally Ann Mine, sitting on the alluvial fan a mile out across the playa. The Park Service removed the buildings, almost certainly because
Abandoned Drott International Tractor (Death Valley)
When I heard a rumor from Guy that there was an abandoned excavator with a view of the salt pan in Death Valley that he had never visited, I knew I had to take a look and see if I could find it. After a bit of research, I was
Lost Burro Mine
Bourke Lee wrote in the 1930s: "There is a Lost Burro Mine on almost every mountain." Prospectors spent so much time chasing their wandering burros through the desert hills that the animals became their best prospecting partners. The Lost Burro in the Cottonwood Mountains of northern Death Valley