Caving in the Pinto Basin Turquoise and Gold Mines of Joshua Tree National Park near Palm Springs
I was about 12 years old when I first ventured into the Pinto Basin, although I didn’t know what it was called at the time. It was the mid-1970s and I was just a kid brought up with my brother and sister while Mom and Dad explored the desert around Palm Springs on a sunny afternoon in a Toyota Landcruiser with their friends. I knew we were a long way from home. It felt like we had traveled beyond the moon. The land had long ceased to be golf courses and city streets. Now it was just sand, rocks, hills, and the occasional brush.
Dad and his friend, Lee, came across a group of low hills at one end of a long, empty valley in what is called Joshua Tree National Park. I knew a lot. I also knew, looking up the hill, that the worn road was rougher than anything my dad had ever attempted on his four-wheeler. But the need to see what lay beyond the ridge was too great. Rather than risk the car that far to help, we decided to hike to the top and look over the edge. There we saw the moved earth that marked a mine as excavated. So we walked around the other side and found not just one mine, but three.
The first turned out to be the deepest and most interesting. I backed up several hundred meters toward the hill where it had been carved. At one point, you had to get on your hands and knees to crawl through the remaining hole of a cave-in from the past. Then you had to walk on an old wooden plank placed over a bottomless hole about eight feet or more wide. There was a rickety old ladder that stretched down forever into it. We drop rocks down its gaping jaws to try to gauge its depth. We could hear the rocks hitting the sides of the hole a few times as they fell. But we don’t hear anything in the background. The board was old, knotted and split. The hole could have been a mile for all that scared me. But I crossed.
Deeper in the mine I found something so incredible that many people I tell you they hesitate to believe. I’m not a geologist. I couldn’t spot a vein of gold if it had a neon sign on it, and that’s what the creators of this mine had been looking for almost a hundred years ago when they dug it, I’m sure, but turquoise, no doubt. It is a deep, brilliant blue-green like all of them, even in its raw form. And right there in the wall of that mine was a line as wide as a man that ran from the floor to the ceiling of the cave, disappeared into the ceiling, and ran under his floor.
Before we left that day, he had entered the mine for the second time, claw hammer at the ready and armed with a five-gallon paint bucket. I tore and scratched and tore those things out of the mountains’ hands until my bucket was full and I brought it all home. he made a neat display in my bedroom framed against a backdrop of my Star Wars album. The rest of the turquoise I gave as a Christmas present, rocks the size of my fists and blue-green in color like the Pacific in Hawaii.
The other mines were fun, though not nearly as great. One went straight down like the hole in the first mine. But there was no horizontal path to traverse. The other had an old train track still in place and a broken rusty ore wagon at the mouth of the cave, it only went in about fifty feet and then there was another stairway that went down about thirty feet to what looked like a landing. Since I was the youngest child, my dad chose me to go down the ladder, thinking that if he could hold me, no one bigger would try. I went to the bottom, but the landing did not lead anywhere, it just ended with no way out.
We drove home that day in the dark with great stories to remember for the rest of our lives.
Fast forward twenty plus years to the mid-1990s. I wanted to find it again, but for the life of me, I had no real idea where it was, except on the other side of Joshua Tree National Park, and that was all a desert through which he had to wander. Still, with no better plan, I got hold of a map and divided it into sections. The first time I went in my Jeep Wrangler with just one of my children and my wife. We didn’t find it. The second time we rented a Jeep Cherokee, because I had more kids, we drove out of the airport and found another section of the desert. No finds yet. But on the third trip, in a big rented four-wheel-drive Ford Excursion, with in-laws and an even larger family, we found gold—or turquoise, you might say.
As we headed down a dirt road that took me farther into the desert than I could swear I’d ever gone before, I saw a set of hills in the distance with a rutted worn road climbing up one of them. My skin shivered. We parked at the end of the road and I grabbed a flashlight, hammer and bucket, a crowd of children and family behind me. At the top of the ridge I saw the disturbed earth from the first mine, and down and behold, at the bottom of the hill near it, was a beat-up old Toyota pickup, still running, and a small group of men dressed in worn clothes. Apparently others had also found the mine over the years.
Still, this was it, again. I entered the mine and crawled through the cave-in, which is now even older, past the deep hole and the plank that stretched over it, careful not to let my children do anything foolish near it. And when I got to the turquoise vein I was a bit surprised, but not totally surprised, to find that my vein had been mined. There were still a few fragments of what I remembered, which I cut out for old times sake. And I found some other blue-green pieces on the floor from kicking the dirt. But the main strip of turquoise had gone to other families, boys, who had also discovered it over the years. We had found the mine and I will never lose it again, it is embedded in my mind as some great destination in the middle of nowhere to go to: my personal slice of the lost Southwestern landscape complete with stories of buried treasure, just stories.
A few years after that, a friend of mine, Chris Shurilla, came to see me. He had some rappelling gear and we headed down the mine. We crawled past the cave-in and looked into the deep hole and the stairway that stretched down forever. There was an old wooden lattice built over the hole that I had overlooked until now, probably because I was always watching where I put my feet and how close I was to the hole on my previous breaches. We strap ourselves to the beam, hold on to the rope, and throw two hundred meters of rope down the hole.
Chris wasn’t afraid. He swung over the empty space and ZEEEE, tore at the rope at a frantic pace. I was cautious like a virgin bride on her wedding night, white-knuckled down the stairs one rung at a time even though I was bound and supposedly safe, safe. One of the old runs collapsed under my weight and I swung into the dead space. Chris laughed at me and yelled at me to hurry up. Once I coughed my heart out of my throat, I sped up my descent. When I reached Chris, he was hanging in the air from a larger chamber. The narrow gorge had opened into a cavity some ten or forty feet wide. The stairway still stretched into the darkness where it was crossed by an old catwalk supported by two-by-fours somehow attached to the seemingly distant walls of the cavern. It was like something out of a Stephen King novel. The catwalk ran into a dark side cavern at each end carved into the earth. Chris says faster than I can answer, “I’ll go check it out,” he loosens his tie and trots across the ancient planks suspended in the light of darkness like a cat on a window sill.
“Chris, you idiot,” I yell at him. Those boards are probably a hundred years old. He comes bouncing under me with no concern. “Oh, they’re fine,” she says. And though I wouldn’t swear to it, maybe it was just my fear going into overdrive, I thought I saw him bounce off of them as a way to test his mettle. If they had failed, I don’t know what he or I would do. “That end,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the hole he had just investigated, “only goes a few feet and ends in dead ends.” Then he went to the other side, disappearing into the darkness again, “This side too.” He came back and tied himself back to the line and we went down some more.
We had another 75 feet of cold drop before we got too close to the end of the rope for comfort. Chris was still hanging comfortably from the rope with no hands holding onto the endless ladder or the sides of the rocky hole. He was still clinging to the ladder, for what it was worth, because despite his old age, he felt better than nothing. But seeing Chris hanging there and the empty blackness below him, we still knew we could go no further. We pray a stone from the side of the hole and let it fall. Although we were 200 meters from the original starting point, the rock did not make any final sounds when resting. We did it again with another rock. We still couldn’t hear it bottomed out.
We went back up to find out that our wives and children were mad at us. We had been in that hole for several hours and they said they had been yelling at us after the first thirty minutes. All they knew was that the rope was still taut and occasionally swayed.
The entire area of the Pinto Basin is literate with mines. if you go out, you have a good chance of dying. I am not saying this to be alarmist. but seriously: there are holes in the ground big enough to drive a car into and some of them are bottomless. There are caves that go hundreds of meters into the mountains, past holes and cave-ins and rotten supports and you are hours away from getting help, even by car, if you have a problem. And if the car breaks down?
Don’t go out unless you are experienced and prepared. Sometimes I can’t believe I did it as a kid and then did it again with mine and then did it again with rope, repellent gear and a fearless friend.