Sunflower Mine...ish

                          

This weekend we decided to settle on a day trip (I know, shocking) and decided upon Sunflower, AZ.
The drive there was gorgeous. The mountains are all covered in snow and all the creeks were full of snowmelt! Kevin joked that I was going to take more picture of the drive than the mine.






Its sad how right he was. When we got there, all the road were closed as of October 12, 2012 for wilderness protection after a forest fire. Oops!










Thankfully there was a Game and Fish officer stopped on the road to give us recommendations on different trails to take in the area.

He recommended a closer mine on the same road that was close enough to hike to in a day. Back to hiking!

I felt like we weren't in the desert on the hike down. It felt more like we were in Colorado! It was pretty chilly and all the peaks were snow covered.

We passed a few hunters on the way up, all looking to javalina and all coming back empty handed. We stopped to talk to one guy with an awesome handlebar mustache who knew about the town and was able to give us at little bit more direction than the officer gave us.

The hunters weren't the only ones that came back empty handed. We had no luck finding the mines, even though we found the sign put up by the mine inspector and a few parts of the town.

We first came across the water tank for the town. It had a ton of pipes coming out of so we started following each one of them. Above the tank was a mountain spring! The water was about room temperature (instead of freezing snow melt) and stunk of sulfur. The rest of the pipes went over to part of the town.












For once I wasn't the first one to go through the pile of trash! We didn't find too much this time. One can of calumate baking powder (which doesn't help because the company started in 1889 and is still around) and a ton of cans of Hills Brothers Coffee... which is also still around. But they did stop putting their ground beans in aluminum during WWII, so we know the town was around early 1900's.





We also found a water trough for either horses or donkeys. Other than that, there wasn't much around. Either that or we missed something.

By the time we started the hike back up most of the snow had melted and it once again felt like we were back in the desert.

poop!

Mountain Spring

Water tank

Rib cage/ spinal column. Yummy