Starbuck's Exploring

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Sample Trips

Here are some sample trips. This site is reader-supported. A lot of work goes into this site. Please help me keep it sustainable, interesting, and ad-free by becoming a subscriber. Thanks for your help!

21 posts

Mount Irish Petroglyphs

Mount Irish Petroglyphs

"Pahranagat Man" haunts this lonely valley. This distinctive anthropomorphic figure appears only in the Pahranagat Valley region, showing up at Mount Irish and a handful of other nearby sites but nowhere else in the American West. It's a fun challenge hunting him down among the volcanic

Champion Spark Plug Mine

Champion Spark Plug Mine

The Champion Spark Plug mine is quite a place. The deposit was initially found in 1916 by Dr. Joseph Jeffery, a dentist who was looking for better minerals from which to build dentures. However, the minerals he found were actually more valuable as insulators for spark plugs. The Champion Spark

Mayflower Mill

Mayflower Mill

The Mayflower Mill (also known as the Shenandoah-Dives Mill) is the only intact and functional flotation mill remaining in Colorado. Every belt, crusher, and flotation cell that was processing ore when the mill closed in 1991 still occupies its original position. While hundreds of precious metal mills across the American

Bodie Ghost Town

Bodie Ghost Town

Bodie is one of the most intact remaining ghost towns in the lower forty-eight states. As a California State Park, it is preserved in a state of “arrested decay.” It is kept in its current condition with minimal restoration so visitors can experience what it was like to see an

Empire Mine State Historic Park

Empire Mine State Historic Park

Back in 2003, we took a trip up to the Sierra Nevada, and our group gained special permission from the California State Park service to explore a small underground portion of the massive Empire Mine inside the appropriately named Empire Mine State Historic Park in beautiful Grass Valley, California. Doug

Coso Petroglyphs

Coso Petroglyphs

Also known as Renegade Canyon or Little Petroglyph Canyon, the Coso Petroglyph Site is the largest concentration of petroglyphs in North America. The canyon has more than 20,000 pecked petroglyphs in a 1- 1/2 mile section. Possibly even more amazing is about half of them are of bighorn

Surprise Tank Petroglyphs

Surprise Tank Petroglyphs

We first visited the Surprise Tank Petroglyphs out in the Mojave Desert in 1998. We’ve stopped by a few times since then but didn’t really photograph the site again until 2009. We re-visited the site in 2013, 2018, and 2020. I wanted to get a few more photos