Fast forward 2.5 hours later, we stop at the cabin to swap our fresh wet wood with the seasoned wood we'd been stock piling out there. Turns out John's cousin, who's living out there, ran out of propane and has been cooking with wood so he'd used most of it up. We ended up grabbing scrap lumber to burn at the camp.
Back on the road, we finally hit dirt and crawl our way back to the remote camp, without a hitch, Lei's truck makes it out, good suspension and good ride. We get to the camp and it's still raining on us a bit and the wind is blowing, we set up our tents, mill around for a while and then decide, what the hell, lets shoot guns! So we did, putting blind rounds into the hillside at night. It's about 3:30 when we get to bed, I couldn't be more beat because I'd only had about 3 hours sleep the night before!
Friday morning, 9am, the sun comes up early and heats your tent fast, by 9 it was just too hot to sleep in the tent, I woke up and could hear Mia rummaging around so I started talking to her, I didn't get OUT of my tent tho, I just laid there with the zipper open letting the wind and light rain hit me, it was great.
After 30 minutes of lounging I got up and made a fire and started cooking breakfast.
We got motivated and decided to take a short drive to the Gold Crown Mine, the shaft is several hundred feet deep and the mill complex was HUGE! There are concrete foundations every where.
We walked around and tried to figure out what various buildings were used for and checked out the new markings on the rocks at almost every single hole.
With gold at almost 1000$ an oz, people are showing more and more interest in these old mines. Here it looks like somebody took a core sample out of the tailings.
Every mine we went to had markings on it that looked fresh, they were all red spray paint with a circle and a dot, then a number like a135. Mia noted that the circle with the dot in the middle of it was the old alchemy symbol for gold.
This year was a wet one so the flowers and grass were in full bloom. This doesn't happen every year, seeing it is so awesome, last time I saw flowers blooming was 2004.
Lei, Mia and I spent the day mostly just lazing around, I napped for a couple of hours and they went exploring a couple of mines. During dinner, I mentioned to Lei and Mia how nice it was with just the three of us, it was certainly the calm before the storm. I also pointed out to them that they shouldn't leave anything near the fire they didn't want burned up, this was a GREAT tip!
Around 6, Kallahar showed up with tacitus, joker and adrenaline and things started getting a little more party-like, Lei whipped out the whiskey and I started drinking from my nalgene bottle. Pescador showed up a couple of hours later and more whiskey comes out. Pescador also brought several THOUSAND black cat firecrackers, this made things a lot more noisy and since most of them got thrown in the fire, also a lot more burny. I had a bet that arclight would make it to camp by midnight, around 11:30, he called us on the radio, he'd made a couple of wrong turns and was in the wrong part of the valley! I told john he had to haul ass, he took some time finding the right turn off, but when he did he followed my advice and ditched the people following him! He made it into camp with about 2 minutes to spare. Win!
It was a nice surprise that arclight had shown up with warflower and lola! There was a lot of drinking and firecrackers in the fire, there was also magnesium in the fire, most importantly, there was magnesium WITH firecrackers.
Sometime in the middle of the night, queeg showed up with amanda and jim, the 6 hours of sleep I'd had in the past two days said, "stay down royal subject," so I did, I stayed down and didn't get up until 10am!
Saturday was almost all shooting, doug, frank and a few desert dogs showed up with some kids in tow and a case of tannerite. We blew that stuff sky high!
We went over to Lake Lake, a watering hole that only exists in the middle of winter to try and blast some tannerite while it was in the water. We never did get it. We ended up just laying them out, I managed 3 of 5 in the group shoot!
Some people ended up heading over to the mission mine, the rest of us headed to camp and made some dinner. The day before Mia and I had admired the sunset and had agreed to climb up Mt Windmore (our name cause it's always fucking windy!) to take some pictures. We got to the top right as the sun was starting to set, I found a good place for my tripod, leveled it, set my exposure and started shooting this panorama.
(I reccomend clicking on this thumbnail for the full sized)
I managed to get about 95% of the way through the sequence when my batteries died, crap, good thing I brought the WHOLE camera beg with me! I drop in two fresh batteries, DEAD TOO! WTF, I *really* thought I'd charged batteries, I spent the next few minutes cursing myself, then I took my own advice I give to other photographers, "don't dwell on the mistakes, take a few minutes to appreciate them in which ever way you normally do such things. I like to say FUCK FUCK FUCK over and over again, sometimes kicking as I go. After your few minutes though, LET IT GO. Get on with your shoot." My advice worked well, I pulled out my little sony and got a couple of nice shots including one of our camp at the foot of Mt Windmore
When we got back, several gallons of sangria came out, queeg tapped his keg and MORE bottle of whiskey were produced. The next several hours are a blur that featured; fighting, burning, puking and knocking down tents.
Fighting:
Puking:
Burning:
Knocking down tents:
I'm not sure about the fighting, I didn't have anything to do with it, the puking, well, I did participate, but not until MUCH later. The burning.. Ok, I was a part of this.. We burnt up everything near the fire, apparently, I also threw jims aluminum cooking pot into the fire though I don't remember it for the life of me. There wasn't a chair to sit in come morning, frankly, I warned people. The tent collapsing was all jim and pescador, jim shoved me into adrenaline's tent, snapping one of the poles, pescador went around pulling the poles out of the pegs in the corners. Most people thought this was funny shit. :)
Come morning, the carnage was clear, joker was stuck in his tent for several minutes looking for the zipper, the fire pit was a twisted wreckage of chairs and several tents were collapsed still after the occupants gave up trying to fight off pescador.
Queeg managed to paint his truck brown btw
We got up, made some breakfast, cleaned up camp (no small feat) and then fought with queeg about getting up. He finally did and we decided to head over to the mission mine so the new folks could get into something a little crazy. Thanks to a massive blister and some unknown trama that caused my big toenail to turn black, I stayed up top, climbed the tower and took pictures from up there.
After the mission mine we decided to explore some new ground and headed for the north side of the mountain range, crossing into and out of Joshua Tree National Monument a few times. We explored some interesting mines, one of them was stocked with water, cement, a folding table and orange cones! How bizarre!
Our concern is that the park is going to close up the entrance to the mine, to the park service mines are nothing more than a hazard and industrial pollution. To many of us, these mines are a link to the past, most of them were opened in the late 1800's and closed in the late 1930's. Here you can see where somebody using a carbide miner's lamp wrote his name on the wall in 1941.
And here you can see the remains of a miner's shack that looks like it blew down.
If the park had their way, they'd remove all of that and try to restore the natural grasses. Things like this 100 year old ore chute would be dismantled and thrown away, talk about a shame.
So anyway, enough with my public service announcement :) As we were pulling up to the last mine, we saw that there were two jeeps blocking the road, one of them had all of it's wheels removed and was literally up on rocks. There were three guys, we talked to two of them and they told us that their power steering pump had given out and they were going to leave the jeep there, get a new pump and come back and fix it. They told us that they were taking all of the good stuff off it so that nobody would steal it. We noticed that at least one of them had a handgun on their belt, we didn't press any of the issues, we just said good day andpassed them on the way to the mine. As soon as we left, they took off. Towards the top of the mine road we did notice fluid on the ground giving credence to their story, we also noticed bud light cans everywhere, thanks. So we explored the mine, came out and stopped by the jeep on the way to our trucks, with nobody around we were free to look over the car better. Oh boy... So there was no registration, paperwork, nothing, 3 of the wheels had been removed, the 4th was still on the truck but no tire and the rim had clearly been driven on. The rear license plate had been removed, but not the front one, the front SHOCKS had been removed but not the rear ones. We also noticed that both wing windows had been broken open and the one on the drivers side had the glass broken out which was still on the floor.
We took off for home, knowing that the jeep with the 3 guys in it had about 30 minutes on us. I crammed in the back and we hit the long dusty trail.
On the way out we passed a guy and asked him if he'd seen a black jeep, he said we were only about 10 minutes behind it, we were excited because we wanted to get the license plate number, what with the guns and stripping of cars, we'd failed to get it. The trip out from the valley floor into the gold crown district is all up hill and pretty sketchy. This was Lei's first time off-roading and the first time his truck had been off-road, all in all he did very well. Until we hit the road up from the golden egg, thats when he got stuck. We also noticed that he wasn't really in 4wheel drive, something was wrong. We hooked up Lei's truck to Kallahars and pulled him up the hill.
Sadly this ate up all of the time we'd made chasing the jeep. :( We made really good time heading for paved road but never saw them. When we did hit paved road, Lei's truck started making a horrible noise, it sounded like he was hitting the rumble strips at the side of the freeway to keep truckers awake. He'd slow down and it would stop. We made it into town with the horrible noise, we went to pull the wheel off and his locking hub FELL OUT! We worked on it for a while and managed to get the hub stuck back on, it was really a temporary fix but it got us home.
While we were eating dinner, we also called the sheriff to report the jeep. After two phone calls and an hour later, we'd FORCED the gps coordinates and the vin number of the stolen jeep on them, they seem FAR less than interested. We did find a couple of business cards inside the jeep for mechanics, I'm going to give them a call and see if they can get word to the owner where their jeep is since the sheriff's dept was WORTHLESS.
No comments:
Post a Comment