There are a lot of weird things in the desert.
Thankful for a few minutes of rest after summiting Argus Peak, we settled into our comfy scheel-mann seats and pointed the Tacoma toward the Nadeau Trail.
The Nadeau Trail is named after freighter Remi Nadeau, one of the many unsung heroes of the Death Valley days. Although seldom acknowledged, freighters played a vital role in the development of remote mining communities by providing economical transportation to haul out their ore and bring supplies on their way back. Nadeau moved west in 1860, and over the next 20 years, forged a successful freighting empire that eventually dominated the eastern California market. There is hardly a mine worth the name that didn't resound with the bells of his teams. Nadeau's teamsters hauled merchandise from LA to Salt Lake City and as far as Montana, freighted borax for Searles Valley, and silver for Darwin, Resting Springs, and Ivanpah. In 1875-1876 his teams made headlines freighting Panamint City's 400-pound silver ingots all the way across the desert to the railroad station at Mojave.
A straight shot.
The Modoc Mine, in the Argus Range at the north end of Panamint Valley, was another of his successes. To reduce travel time, in the spring of 1877 he had a large crew of Chinese immigrants build the shortest possible access road to the Modoc Mine - which would later be named the Nadeau Trail. From the pass into Searles Valley the completed road went straight up Panamint Valley, hugging the Argus Range to shave precious miles, then cut west to the mine. It was indeed so straight that it earned the nickname of Shotgun Road. By the end of 1876, Nadeau had already delivered $400,000 worth of ingots to Mojave. Nadeau's fees were probably around $50 per ton, so that his road was paying back a tidy $500 a day - not to mention the extra cash he was picking up by hauling charcoal from Wildrose Canyon's kilns to the Modoc smelters. Hiking Western Death Valley
We wouldn't be visiting the Modoc Mine this time; we'd visited it on our first trip along the Nadeau Trail. Rather, we were headed back to the St. George Mine group, where we'd heard that somewhere high in the Argus, a lone man had built an unlikely road, seemingly to nowhere. And then, he'd left his tractor at the very end.
First though, I wanted to check out some old rock ruins at the southern end of the Nadeau Trail.
Rock retaining walls built by Nadeau's Chinese laborers still support the road over the Slate Range Crossing.
We'd passed the ruins on our last visit, and I think I'd even known about them, but as usual we'd been in a bit of a time crunch and weren't able to stop and see everything along the way. They'd come up again for me five years later when Bill pointed them out as a possible stage stop and something he thought he might check out on his next visit to the area.
There were 18 of these little stone foundations, none of them seemingly reminiscent of stage-stop structures.
I’m not sure what they were, but they certainly weren’t a stage stop. The shapes of them were much more fluid (?) than I’d expect from a western settler. And, the location and quantity seem wrong for them to have been part of a Native American settlement, they sure felt like the base of small, single-inhabitant shelters to me.
The most interesting, a spiral.
All the foundations had an opening. This circular one was 8 feet in diameter.
After a few minutes of puzzling - sometimes my most natural state - I climbed back into the Tacoma as @mrs.turbodb continued to heed the advice of her smarter-than-us Garmin watch, which told her that 96 hours of sleep was what her body most needed at this moment in time.
Forty-five minutes later, we were climbing the alluvial fan into the Argus Range toward Snow Canyon.
Into the sun.
We'd found this slightly creepy Desert dodder - a parasitic plant that sends small, short-lived rootlets into its host's tissues to absorbs moisture and nutrients - covering almost everything in Panamint Valley and the Argus.
Winding our way up into the canyon, our destination for the evening would be the same as our trailhead the next morning - the St. George Mill at the end of the road.
A double-decker ore bin with some sort of rotating crusher between the two levels and an old workshop would be interesting to poke around while we were in camp.
Turns out that there was a lot more to this old mine than we'd known about on our first visit, so after convincing my hiking partner that she didn't have to let her watch tell her what to do, we took a short stroll up the canyon to a few more of the old mine's workings and structures.
The rickety old chute on this lonely ore bin was made of corrugated roofing!
I love finding old wheelbarrows for some reason.
Up above the ore bin, an adit extended far underground. Interestingly, where most seem to tunnel perpendicularly into the mountain, this one extended in only about 30 feet, and then tee-ed off in both directions, running parallel to the face of the hillside for hundreds of yards. Along the way, several "interestingly" timbered stopes screamed "totally safe" as I gingerly worked deeper into the mine.
If I were a bug, this would be my bug light.
Which way should I go? Why not both!
I guess the old miners were hanging themselves from ropes attached to the timbers supporting the walls of the stope. Seems "safe." (left) | "Precise structural engineering." (right)
Smeared onto the wall of the tunnel, I found a few old miner signatures.
Steve Bozich Palmdale (left) | [illegible] (top right) | Frank L (bottom right)
Back to safety.
Nestled into the hillside, stone wall foundations from one of two old five-stamp mills that echoed off these canyon walls in the late 1800s.
After an hour or so of poking around, we each wandered back to camp via different routes - @mrs.turbodb along the old road in the wash, me along the narrow miner trails that still cling to the hillsides and serve as burro-fares for the local riffraff.
By this time, the sun had vanished below the horizon and we were both hungry and tired. It was time for some taco-rritoes and our first good night's sleep in 48 hours!
Turns out we didn't spend much time poking around the old ore bin.
We sleep better on the back of the Tacoma than we do anywhere else.
Goodnight Telescope Peak.
The following morning...
Our first day in the Argus had been long, but it was our second day that I was worried I'd planned too much. Rather than adjust those plans to a reasonable itinerary - that would be entirely too responsible of me - I simply unilaterally expanded the timeline by setting my alarm for well-before-sunrise. Problem "solved."
With such an early start, I assured @mrs.turbodb that we'd be back before lunch, but we ultimately decided that it would be an efficient use of time for her to prepare our chicken sandwiches while I put away the tent and gathered the plethora of camera gear I'd be hauling out the escaped tractor that'd built a road to nowhere.
Both well-practiced in our morning routines, we were ready to go in no time, and pointed ourselves toward an old miner's trail that led up toward the ridge.
These old trails are fun to follow and usually easier to hike than the roads!
Spring was out in force.
Orange mallow. (left) | Cleftleaf wildheliotrope (Phacelia crenulata). (center) | Fritillary. (right)
Making quick work of the trail, we were soon standing a few hundred feet above camp, at the old ore bin - which was also the lower aerial tram terminal - of the Saddle Mining Company that once ran the operations at the St. George Mine.
Now just a jumble of lumber on the ground.
From here, we had a choice to make - we could either continue along the old miner's trail, or we could transition to an old road that continued up the ridgeline. Both would ultimately take us to the main workings at the top of the mine, though the road was shorter. Mostly because I enjoy walking in the footsteps of the old miners, we decided to take the foot trail up, and the road back down. Or at least, we took it back down part of the way. The road turned out to be one of the most precipitous mining roads we've ever had the fortune to walk - from the ore bin to the rim of the canyon, it ascends 1,300 feet in 1 mile, and its steepest pitch tops the 40% mark!
Sighting over the collapsed ore bin and following the cable of the old aerial tramway, we could see the historic mill high on the hillside. Talk about motivation!
Up we go.
Tram tower.
While narrow, the old foot trail featured a much more inviting grade, and soon we were at the combination ore bin-mill that still clings to the high canyon walls.
This historic camp is one of Snow Canyon's oldest sites. The wooden mill is a complex structure of patinated lumber, quite interesting to study. A little further, the tiered concrete foundations of another mill lie below the trail. Its dumps of dusty quartz sparkle with metallic glints (of course the flecks of gold aren't gold, but fool's gold and chalcopyrite). The trail ends shortly at a singular camp sheltered between rocky walls and a high fall. It has a one-room stone house, a well-constructed tent platform, a corral, and the customary junk. A commodity more precious than gold oozes out of the collapsed tunnel by the camp and pools in a shallow pond where burros gather for a drink.
Not a workplace for anyone afraid of heights!
As with the ore bins below, this mill crushed material as it came out of the upper hopper.
This old single-piston engine still spun reasonably freely, at the mine camp near the upper mill.
I guess it's true what they say, "X marks the spot."
Not far above the high camp, two deep timbered shafts and a long trench were the mine's main producers. Ore from horizontal tunnels in the main shaft was dropped through raises to a nearby tunnel, then trammed in ore cars and cabled to the mill before initially being carried down by burros and later trammed down to the wash.
Snow Canyon view.
Outside the shafts - which were inaccessible to us - we found a couple interesting artifacts. I had no idea how large burro molars were, but there was an entire jaw full scattered about. Intermixes, of course, with the requisite aqua ore.
Chomp, chomp. (left) | We're rich! (right)
Turns out we weren't the only ones to find these burro bits up here. Tom and Julie discovered them - along with some much larger, now-missing pieces, a few months earlier, which I only realized when they posted a video on the day we were up at the mine!
Our exploration of the mine complete, it was finally time to chase down the old tractor that'd brought us up here in the first place. Finding it was easy - that old, steep mining road only went one place - requiring only that we blindly follow an inexplicable road along the high ridges of the Argus Range for nearly a mile.
Lake Hill in Panamint Valley, with Towne Peak towering above. At least the guy had good views while he worked.
And then, there it was!
Close ups. Radiator on the front of the little beast. (left) | Spark plugs on a strangely unbolted block. (top right) | Beefy tracks. (bottom right).
Standing behind the Cletrac 15, we knew we were looking at a machine that was built for ground that had no patience for rubber. The Cleveland Tractor Company (Cletrac) started making these crawler tractors in 1916, and by the early 1920s the Model 15 was their workhorse. Compact, tracked, and surprisingly capable for its size, a tractor like this wasn't pulling plows; it was grinding through terrain and building roads that - at 40% grades - were both impassable any other vehicle, and led absolutely nowhere.
Let's go places.
What made Cletrac genuinely interesting, though, was the steering. While the competition simply cut power to one track and hoped for the best, Cletrac's patented controlled differential kept both tracks driving through a turn, at different speeds. Smooth and precise in conditions where neither of those things came easy.
Eventually bought out by Oliver in 1944, and the Cletrac name faded reasonably quickly, but a machine like this one tells the story of what it took to pull something valuable out of some of the most unforgiving ground on the continent. And then abandon it.
It was only as we were about to leave that another bit of history caught my eye. An umbrella frame - laying on the ground next to the escaped 4-cylinder beast - was initially a mystery to us both. Until it wasn't. There, still strapped to the back of the 4,000-pound machine was the base of the pole on which it once sat.
This dude was dozing in style! 
Satisfied, we soaked in one last look at Panamint Valley before heading back down the road the Cletrac 15 scratched onto the surface of the earth a century ago. Or at least, we slipped down it until we found an intersection with the much more foot-friendly trail we'd taken on the way up.
A remote place, falling away on three sides into precipitous canyons.
Just after noon, we arrived back at camp. A little too early for lunch and with another hike to complete before the sun set for the day, we piled into the Tacoma for the short trek to the neighboring canyon. There, we'd once again follow old miner's trails to find little-known secrets of the Argus.
A nice view of Telescope Peak on the way out.
The Whole Story
