I was about 12 years old when I ventured to get to the Pinto pool, although I did not know that this was due at the time. It was the mid-1970s, and I was just a kid, bought with my brother and sister, while mom and dad explored the desert around Palm Springs on a sunny day at the Toyota Landcruiser with their friends. I knew that we were far from home. It looked like we had gone beyond the moon. The earth has long left the golf courses and streets of the city. Now it was only sand, rocks and hills, and sometimes scrub grass.
Dad and his friend, Lee, met a group of low hills at one end of a long wasteful valley in Joshua Three National Park. I knew so much. I also knew, looking at the hill, that the worn out road was rougher than anything my dad tried to do in his four-wheeled car. But the desire to see what was outside the ridge was too great. Instead of risking a car far from help, we decided to go to the ridge and peer into its edge. There we saw the displaced dirt that marked my mine, which we dug. Therefore, we went on the other side and found not one mine, but three.
The first was the deepest and most interesting. I returned a few hundred yards to the hill from which it was cut. At some point, you had to get on all fours to crawl through the remaining hole from a long cave. Then you had to go through an old board lying above a bottomless hole about eight feet long or more. It has always had an old wobbly staircase. We dropped stones in his gaping mouth to try to measure its depth. We heard the rocks falling on the sides of the hole a couple of times as they fell. But from the bottom we did not hear anything. The board was old, knotted and split. The hole could be milder for anything that scared me. But I went.
Further into the mine, I met something so incredible that many people about whom I speak are embarrassed to believe. I am not a geologist. I could not determine the gold mine if there was a neon sign on it - and this is what the creators of this mine were looking for almost a hundred years ago when they dug it, I am sure of it - but turquoise is not mistaken. Deep greenish blue and bright as everyone goes, even in its raw form. And right there, in the wall of this mine, there was a strip as wide as a man, and ran from the floor to the ceiling in the cave, disappearing into the roof and running, benefiting its floor.
Before we left that day, I entered the mine for the second time, a hammer, a hammer, ready and armed with a bucket of five gallons. I cracked, grabbed and ripped this stuff from the mountains, caught until my bucket filled up and bought all the houses. he did a neat show in my bedroom, framed in the background of my Star Wars album. A turquoise reminder that I tidy up like Christmas presents, fist-sized rocks and blue-green like the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii.
Other mines were fun, though not so great. One went straight down, like a hole in the first shaft. But there was no horizontal track. The other had an old rail track that still lay, and a ruined rusty ore machine at the mouth of the cave traveled only about fifty feet, and then there was another staircase 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 stairs, wondering if this could hold me, no one else would have tried. I went to the bottom, but the landing did not lead to anything, it just ended.
That day we were busy in the dark with great stories to remember for the rest of our lives.
Accelerate more than twenty years to the mid-1990s. I wanted to find him again, but for life I didn’t have any real idea of where it was different than in the distant part of Joshua Tree National Park, and it was very simple to get through the desert. However, without a better plan, I received a map and divided it into sections. The first time I went to my Jeep Wrangler with one of my children and my wife. We did not find it. The second time we rented a Jeep Cherokee, because I had more children from the airport and searched another stretch of desert. Still no finds. But the third trip, while in a large rented all-wheel drive Ford Excursion, supplemented by laws and a large family, we were stuck in gold or turquoise that you could say.
As we descended a dirt road that led me farther into the desert than I could have sworn I had left, I saw a lot of hills in the distance, with an exhausted worn road rising above one of them. My skin tingled. We parked at the bottom of the road, and I grabbed a flashlight, a hammer and a bucket, many children and the family behind me. At the top of the ridge, I saw the displaced dirt of the first shaft, and below and on the hill next to it was a whipped old Toyota pickup, still functioning, and a small carriage of men dressed in worn clothes. Over the years, almost others have found a mine.
However, this was the case. I went into the mine and crawled into an already older cave, walked past a deep pit and plank that stretched over it, not allowing my children to do something stupid next to it. And when I got to the turquoise vein, I was somewhat surprised, although not quite, to find out that my vein had been crossed out. There were some more fragments of what I remembered, and I broke them off in the old days. And I found several other blue-greens on the floor, throwing away the dirt. But the main part of turquoise went to other families, the boys, who also discovered it over the years. We found the mine, and I will never lose it again, it is built into my mind as a great place in the middle to go to: my own bit of a lost southwestern landscape, full of stories about buried treasures, only fairy tales.
A few years later, my friend Chris Shurilla came to me. He had some kind of equipment for the descent, and we headed to the mine. We crawled past the cave and looked into a deep hole, and the stairs stretched forever. Over the pit was built an old wooden lattice, which I still missed, probably because I always looked where I put my feet and how close to the hole I had committed in my previous crimes. We tied up on a beam, clamped on the line and dropped two hundred yards into the groove.
Chris was not afraid. He jumped out into the empty space and Seeee, he broke the rope with a mad step. I was wary, like a virgin bride on her wedding night, a white knuckle down the stairs one step at a time, although I was tied up and supposedly safe, secure. One of the ancient youths collapsed under my weight, and I jumped into the dead space. Chris laughed at me and shouted to hurry. As soon as I pulled my heart out of my throat, I accelerated my descent. When I talked to Chris, he hung in the air in a wider chamber. The narrow throat opened into the cavity about thirty or forty feet across. The staircase still stretched across the middle of the blackness, where it was crossed by an old cat walk, supported by two four, somehow attached to seemingly distant walls of the cave. It was like something from Stephen King's novel. The cat's gait ran into the dark side of the cave at each end, cut to the ground. Chris speaks faster than I can answer: “I'll go check it out,” unfastens his insurance and sobs on ancient boards suspended in the dark, like a cat on a windowsill.
“Chris, you're an idiot,” I scream. Perhaps these boards - a hundred years. He returns under me without anxiety. “Oh, they are beautiful,” he says. And while I didn’t swear on it, perhaps it was my fear, which bears overdrive, I thought I saw him bouncing on them, as a way to test their character. If they failed, I don’t know what he or I would have done. “At that end,” he said, jerking his thumb back to the hole he had just explored, “just a few feet and dead ends.” He went to the other side, disappearing again in the dark: "This side too." He came back and attached to the line, and we went down further.
We still had about 75 feet, we collapsed before we came too close to the end of the rope for comfort. Chris was still lying comfortably on the rope, with no hands holding the endless stairs or the sides of the rocky hole. I was still clinging to the ladder, to the fact that it cost, because in all its old age she felt better than nothing. But seeing that Chris was hanging there and the empty blackness beneath him, we still knew that we could not go on. We pulled a stone from the side of the hole and dropped it. Although we were 200 yards from the original starting point, the rock did not give final rest. We did it again with another rock. We still could not hear him hit the bottom.
We got up and found that our wives and children were angry with us. We stayed for a few minutes, and they said that they shouted to us after the first thirty minutes. The only thing they knew was the rope, which was still stretched, and this reason turned upside down.
The entire territory of the Pinto Basin is dotted with mines. if you go out there, you have a good chance of dying. I do not say that it is alarmist. but seriously: there are holes in the ground big enough to drive a car, and some of them have no bottom. There are caves that go hundreds of yards into the mountains, past holes and caves and rotten support, and you can get away from help even by car if you have problems. And what if the car breaks down.
Do not go there if you are not experienced and not prepared. From time to time I can’t believe that I did it as a child, and then I did it again with mine, and then I did it again with a rope, a disgusting equipment and a fearless friend.
