September 2026 News

It's been four months since the last newsletter, so this one covers quite a bit. We have eight new trips and a new author, Ro.

Ro's trips center on Montana, and Swede Prospect is a good place to start. Three Swedish miners worked a gold prospect that never paid. When a neighbor named Coyote Bill demanded half their profits and they said no, he shot bricks off their cabin chimney. It's free to read.

I didn't get out much this summer, but when I did, it was mostly drifting around the Mojave Preserve and Death Valley. Otherwise, I've been working on a few projects and doing research. Three of the new trips are in the Mojave Preserve, two of them written with Matt Venn of Pockets Full of Dust.

New Trips

Swede Prospect

Swede Prospect is a site that has been nearly wiped away. Indeed, so little remains that I almost did not write about it until I read further into the prospect’s history. While only a few depressions, scattered rocks, and two filled and caved adits remain, the mine has a

Starbuck's ExploringRo

Benbow Mine (Stillwater County)

Named for Thomas Chalkley Benbow, an aviation pioneer, inventor, and prospector, the Benbow mine saw little success during his lifetime. Situated at an elevation of more than 8,400 feet in the Stillwater igneous complex, the mine later proved to be a vital wartime source of chromite, and today, the

Starbuck's ExploringRo

Copper Queen Mine (Mojave Preserve)

Three tunnels pierce the mountainside at the head of Keystone Canyon, in the New York Mountains, one above another, each shorter than the one below. This is the Copper Queen Mine, which the Geological Survey’s 1956 report called the Queen. Hardly anyone knows the place. The lowest tunnel runs

Starbuck's ExploringMatthew Venn

Abandoned McCormick-Deering TracTracTor (Mojave Preserve)

A crawler tractor sits on a hillside in the Mojave National Preserve, well off any road. It’s a McCormick-Deering 10-20 TracTracTor, International Harvester’s first production crawler, introduced in 1928. The company had built experimental tracklayers a decade earlier, and outside firms had been bolting track units

Starbuck's ExploringGuy Starbuck

Kennedy Mine

As you depart the downtown of historic Gold Rush town Jackson heading north on Hwy 49, a large headframe and three-story building can be seen on the hillside below. A small sign advertises weekend tours of the Kennedy Mine. This only hints at the enormous scale of this major

Starbuck's ExploringHugh M. Smith

Skookum Mine (Cle Elum)

The Skookum Mine is a hard place to make sense of. A large amount of work clearly went into it, but I cannot figure out why. From a fair amount of time spent searching the dumps and hillside, I could find no sign of mineralization whatsoever. Calling a mine a

Starbuck's ExploringGC

Garvanza Mine

The Garvanza Mine sits in an unnamed canyon on the north slope of the New York Mountains. Few visitors find their way in, and the road does its best to keep it that way. The last mile is a slow crawl over large boulders, the hike is a wash scramble

Starbuck's ExploringGuy Starbuck

Regal Mine (Clark Fork)

This trip was from quite a long time ago. Because of that the pictures are pretty poor. There is not too much to say about the Regal Mine, but it is not terribly hard to get to and worth the stop if you are in the area. It was first

Starbuck's ExploringGC

Updated Pages

I did a major revision of the Dating Historical Sites guide. I checked the can, bottle, and nail sections against additional sources, corrected a number of dates, and added diagrams.