Harquahala Day 2

I love these abandoned towns. The people really like their alcohol and the only methods of disposal is to throw it out the window. So I go around and find a description on the bottle and then google search the company.









This towns bottle of reference was A B & Co. Started in 1885 and ended in 1905.

And then I was smart and google searched the town itself.

Harquahala was started in the late 1880s and was a big booming gold town. There were about 450-500 people in the town, based on the amount of people in the cemetery  One group of researchers dug through the cemetery and found 50 different graves. Mostly adult males but some children as well. Some kind person went around and put up crosses and fake flowers on all the marked graves.





All of the gold had been mined by 1907 and the residents picked up and left.

There was still a ton for us to look at though!

What we saw last night was only the start of what there was to see. The houses were much closer than we thought they were. Plus the whole side of the mountain was carved into. We found quite a few more foundations and one plus we think was a public restroom! I think we searched the mountain for a good two hours and found four or five mines plus some old mining equipment.





Plus we found our friends from last night. A bunch of old people in an RV caravan. They seemed friendly.

After that we drove around lost for a while, made a u turn (so I guess we weren't "officially" lost) and headed back to the Golden Eagle mine area. There were so many mines!! At first we just found one that was closed, but then we noticed a hole in a mountain we were passing and decided to check it out. We found one mine that was still completely open! We didn't go far into it but we did go to the first split in the mine. And then we went to go find all the shafts for the mine. One of them even had a rope ladder that went down into it. Those we stayed out of.


The next adventure of the day was a trip to the Harquahala Smithsonian Observatory. It was built in the 1920's by the Smithsonian to study climate change and was open for five years until they decided to move it somewhere that actually has... you know... weather.







We didn't quite make it there.

The Subaru (now named Subi) could have made it up, but we would have been traveling back down in the dark. That was not going to happen. The road was super rough and four wheel was definitely needed. It would have been nice to have thicker tires as well, though it wasn't really necessary. And it would have been awful to do in the dark.







We made it about 5 1/2 out of the 10 1/2 miles. And it took about 30 minutes. Definitely a possible future hiking trip.

All and all this was a great overnight trip! We got to do a lot of exploring, I got a wicked sunburn, and we have some great ideas for future trips!

Close up of the sand

Bathrooms!

A hole in the ground house

The house

Looking out the house