Sarah & Kevin's Excellent Adventure: South Mountain Mine

Oh my gosh, a picture of us

Who knew there was a mine right in our backyard! And it wasn't all that hard to get to either. And since most of the people who read our blog (besides our loving families of course :) ) are in the Phoenix area so it's actually worth sharing how to get there!

To get to it, you want to take the Chandler Blvd exit off the the I-10 and take it going west until the road ends at 19th street. There's a parking area next to some random blocked off road that has no use. The trail head starts here. You follow the trail head until the first right, which puts you on Pyramid Trail. From here is where we took a different trail.

The site that we found this trail on said to go up the hill, and then you can see the mine from the top. This put us on Busera trail, which got pretty steep in some places. But we could see the mine from this trail! And we probably wouldn't have found it had we not taken the Busera trail. From the top we also saw what Google maps calls "The Lost Ranch" which is a really awesome ruin.

The trail that we took ended up giving us an 8 mile hike for the day (which we kind of needed since, for some odd reason, my loving boyfriend showed up in the morning with a can of Spam because he was craving it?). It was a really nice trail that I would recommend, but there is a short and easy way to get to the ruin as well. We took Pyramid Trail to Busera Trail then down a no named side trail and finally right onto Lost ranch trail. This took us up to one of the peaks and then back down, but it is possible to stay on the bottom by taking Pyramid Trail and then making a left on Lost Ranch Trail.

The only ruin on trip was, what appeared to be, an old mansion. It was just one building made of stone that had completely fallen apart except for the foundation and half of a wall with a window. There were about six rooms, and both the fireplace and an oven thing were left standing. We didn't find any big piles of cans, though! Shocking.

From the ruins, we took Lost Ranch Trail back down to Lost Ranch Mine Trail. This took us up to the Delta Max mine. The city of Phoenix tried to fill it in, and were mostly successful. But the opening still had a two feet gap that was possible to look in to. And boy, did it reek of pee. My first thought was that the guys in the area before us peed into it. Or there was a dead body (do they smell like pee?). Kevin just figured it was the way the rock smelled. It was definitely not one of those smells that you can habituate to.

Of course we still went into the mine. The roof was solid enough that we felt comfortable going a few feet in. It was clear where the entrance was and the wood was still holding strong. We also bought a strong new flashlight, and we couldn't see the end of the tunnel with the light. Kevin ventured a little farther in and found that the tunnel also turned to the left. That's when he let out an "Oh my goodness..."

I got the heck out of there as fast as I could. I figured by dead body theory was dead on (And no, the pun was not intended, I didn't realize I had done that until I read this over haha). Once I was out of the tunnel I asked what it was. Kevin was out right behind me, almost as freaked out as I was (but not really, I can pretend). He said it was some kind of animal and he wanted to go back and take pictures of it to find out what it was. Turns out it was a Ringtail! That explained the pee smell.