Back in 2012, we visited little-known Johnny Shoshone Spring inside Death Valley National Park. It is a place I’ve been curious about for some time. The spring is not much more than a seep, but what is interesting is that this was a summer camp for Johnny Shoshone, one of the last of the Panamint Shoshone Indians living in the Panamint mountains. Johnny is famous for staking the first claim on the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine over at Rhyolite. It’s reported that Bob Montgomery paid Johnny two dollars and a pair of overalls for that claim. The Montgomery-Shoshone Mine produced five million dollars worth of gold in the next few years.
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Mother Wood's Saloon, Death Valley
One of the things that I love most about a place like Death Valley is that you never know what you might discover literally anywhere. From the (at least) 12,000 year history of known & unknown Native American tribes that have called this place home to the ephemeral boom-towns
Greene Denner Drake Mill
Tucked away in a small canyon just off of Emigrant Canyon/Wildrose Road, on the slopes of the northern Panamint Mountains at 5,020 feet elevation, sits the Greene-Denner-Drake Mill. Forever in the shadow of its more famous neighbor, Skidoo, this quiet spot sees few visitors. This little camp contains
Graham Mine
Prospectors flooded into the southern Black Mountains during the Greenwater mining boom of the early 1900s, scouring every canyon and wash. The Rhodes Spring area as well as Virgin Spring Canyon saw intermittent activity, with limited productive mining resulting (See Lost Rhodes Mine). The remote location with its subsequent high