RHH's photos with the keyword: mining

This old mill used for crushing gold ore is located in Warm Spring Canyon in Death Valley National Park near Warm Spring Mining Camp. The camp was built in the early 1900's and was the center of gold and talc mining in the area. The old buildings from the camp still remain and the spring for which the area is named is in the hills behind the camp.

Warm Spring is an important and historical spring in Death Valley National Park. It was originally the site of a winter camp of the Shoshone Indians. In the 1880's a ranch was established there which was later destroyed by flash floods. In the early 1900's a gold and talc mining camp was located there, of which the buildings still remain. The site is now the property of the National Park Service.

There was a lot of mining in Death Valley before it became a national park and among other things borax was mined there and hauled out of the valley in these huge wagons drawn by twenty teams of mules. Because of the difficulty in getting the borax out of the valley the venture was never very successful. This wagon is parked at the Harmony Borax Works near Furnace Creek where the borax was gotten ready for shipment.

While in Death Valley National Park we rented a four-wheel-drive Jeep for two days in order to explore some of the backcountry. One area we explored took us through Warm Spring Canyon, to Butte Valley where we saw several old prospector's cabins and Striped Butte, one of the striking features of this beautiful valley.

This cabin is in Butte Valley in the backcountry of Death Valley National Park. It is called the Geologist's Cabin but was built by a a prospector. It is available on a first-come, first-serve basis and is a rather comfortable and attractive accommodation. We had hoped to stay there but it had already been occupied. In the end that proved a good thing for us since we had rented a Jeep to exp;lore the backcountry and were able to see a lot more than we would have seen if we had spent the rest of the day in the area of the cabin.

There are over 2000 feral burros in Death Valley National Park, the descendants of burros brought in by prospectors before Death Valley became a national park. They are a huge problem in the park since they eat the available vegetation and displace the native wildlife. This wild burro was photographed just outside the park between Rhyolite and Beatty, Nevada, in the Amargosa Valley.

The Tom Kelly Bottle House is in Rhyolite, Nevada, a ghost town just outside of Death Valley National Park. The house was built in 1906 by Tom Kelly, an Australian goldminer using around 50,000 bottles. After building the house he auctioned it off and the Bennet family who won the auction lived in it from 1906 to 1914. It is now