Desert Mysteries and Things

I was born and raised within rifle shot of the first Christmas campsite of Spaniards in the New World.  My whole family spent a lot of time explaining history.  (Mostly who the Yankees shot).    I guess as a result I’m hooked on what used to be and always spend time researching whatever area I find myself in.

Curiosity does strange things to those blessed/cursed with an overabundance of it.   I love mountains, but not unless I understand the forces and circumstances that put them there.  The Snake River Plain/Yellowstone Hotspot track has plowed across the Basin and Range just north of here and so I spend a lot of time trying to put together volcanic episode sequences from nothing but amateur observations and uneducated guesses augmented by maps, photos and Google Earth.  Sometimes its’ hard to believe I’m not the first one to walk some of these trails.

Walking across what was melted rock some hundreds of feet thick and now covered with wind-blown dust and soil and sage brush as far as the eye can see is awe inspiring when the nuances of overlapping lava flows and vast but slow heaves and sags are understood and finally recognized.  In some places in southern Idaho these flows are so fresh nothing grows in the jumble of razor-sharp black basalt that covers hundreds of square miles.  Other, older flows still have the deep cracks and crevices but have gradually gained enough soil for some sheep forage to grow.  Such was the case several years ago north of American Falls, Idaho when a sheep herder found a hat……

I got this story in  gunshop conversation, so it’s heritage is in doubt, but basically true, I think.

The sheep ranges of southern Idaho and northern Nevada were hard won from cattlemen and the natives.  Stories of the sheep wars of Deadline Ridge just east of here and the “Indian Mike’s Band troubles” where a couple of cowboys were killed by a small family group of local Indians about four miles southeast of here….. and the saga of Tijuana Jack’s mountain top hand-dug hideout just to the south…. History is pretty recent in these parts.  Many times you hear of daring raids on rustlers camped in a local creek bottoms by ranchers and then find out the teller of the story is the grandson of one of the ranchers that did it….or of one of the outlaws.  Both still live here.

 Stockmen came right after the wagons headed to Oregon and California but ‘civilization’ didn’t start until almost exactly a hundred years ago with the canal companies and farmers creating towns where only remote trading post and ranch houses had stood before.  This is an area of immigrants. Everybody came from somewhere else in the last generation or three.

The Basque people, originally of the Pyrenees mountains that divide France and Spain, have run sheep on these ranges for many decades, and still do.  Its’ not at all uncommon to stop on a desert road to chat with a sheep man and find he knows no English and very little Spanish.  The language is Latin based and still spoken in the old hotels and great restaurants of the Basin and Range.

     One such herder found a hat one afternoon down in a crevice in the vast expanse of an old lava flow near Craters of the Moon.  He could barely reach the old felt by laying down and stretching as far as he could, but he finally snagged it with his fingertips and pulled it up. Somewhere right about then he noticed a patch of hair stuck to the hat and a bright skull still in the crack.   It’s said he was an excitable lad of limited language and it took a while for folks to realize just exactly what it was he was trying to say once he rode all the way to town to report his find.   Then there was a problem the next day of trying to find that exact crevice again in the sameness of an horizon to horizon rock pile and a kid that just wanted to get away acting as a guide.   The skeleton was finally found again and recovered.  Most of the clothes were still in pretty good shape but definitely dated in style and material.   Much of the mystery was solved when the eighty five cents in coins in a small leather purse in his pocket were all made before 1894.  His leg was broken and jammed in the crack……no mention in a paper…there were none.  A mystery still.

I think about those kinds of thing as I walk across this desert in search of *something*.  Sometimes I find flattened and rusty old tobacco tins or a sardine can opened with a pocket knife by some long ago wrangler.  Sometimes it’s a thrown horseshoe or scrap of fence wire.  One afternoon about two miles from home and well away from any established trails, I found half a bridle bit.  The rein ring was pulled out oblong-shaped and it was crusted with old rust. Now a forged bit that broke in half means some kind of real horse wreck!    The pulled out of shape and  warped steel rein ring pointed to a runaway team that had run over a rein and jerked the horse’s head around.  I scoured the area thinking there could be bones at such a site but all I found was two wood screws. (?)   Hmmm …..mysterious.

A local cowboy told me that several years ago, when this place was a ‘jail’ for juveniles, he was riding down the creek several miles from here and came across a white sock lying near the trail.  You just have to look around when something so odd is found in a place where rattlesnakes are MUCH more likely than athletic socks.  He continued on riding and looking after his cattle, but keeping a wary eye out for …whatever!....  and found another sock!!  That mystery was solved when he caught up with an escapee kid that had gathered together enough socks to make a run for Jackpot eight miles away, by straight line, eighteen miles by road, and nineteen miles by creek.  To prevent such attempts their shoes were locked up at night.  This kid had obviously made some bad decisions in his life and he hadn’t learned much, yet.  He escaped by creek, the longest route, and where the low and camouflaged prickly pear cactus grows the thickest.  He ran short of socks before he made it a quarter of the way.

In three years of wandering and looking and wondering there’s been several things I’ve found that I really don’t understand.  One is a pair of mine shafts near the creek that no claim was filed on in either state and that make absolutely NO sense, in the geologic view.  I have no idea why anybody would spend so much effort in such a place with no signs of how they got there, where they stayed, or why.  Nobody just digs two holes twenty feet deep in solid bedrock for fun…not forty miles from town and no road near!  I don’t understand it.

Golf balls are common on this desert.  (*Common*, you say?!)  Yup, common.  I know I’ve found at least fifty golf balls in places MORE than a mile from any road or trail. I’ve found them in the creek, sitting on ledges 400 feet above the creek and on sage flats three miles from the creek.  Golf balls are everywhere.  Now, I DO have a small cannon that shoots golf balls a mile or so, but these haven’t been shot out of anything.  Some are range balls and some are expensive, sho’ ‘nuff golf balls.   Jackpot has a golf course two ridges over but I’ve seen brand name, but weather-beaten golf balls nearly twenty miles from there! 

  Last spring I finally figured out the “Case of the Ghostly Golf Balls”.

     I was on another excursion several miles up the creek and caught the flutter of an orange survey ribbon WAY up in a crack in a lava cliff. It was obviously not a survey marker because it was on a vertical surface and this place hasn’t been surveyed since the nineteen teens.  Through the binoculars the ribbon was faded but there was no doubt what it was.   It took a determined effort to climb up out of the narrow creek canyon at one of the only places it’s possible and walk along the cliff-tops until I could overlook that ledge.  Things look different from down below!!   I finally found a Raven’s nest in a crevice filled with scraps of ribbon, rabbit fur, a broken fan belt, pop tops, and at least a dozen golf balls.  Whew!  I was beginning to *really* get curious!   They must think they’re eggs, a large part of a Raven’s diet in the spring.  Most of the stuff in the nest must have come from the highway twelve miles to the west.

I still haven’t figured out the pair of jeans I found wrapped around the trunk of a sage brush, but I’ve heard the stories of the guy seen leaping along the ridge high above the Jackpot casinos, totally  nude and waving a big shiny knife…..that was several years ago.   Is it possible he walked fifteen miles and climbed over two high ridges without his jeans to do that?!   Whoever left them left five bucks in the pocket.  Thank you.    I liked that better than the composted peanut butter sandwiches stashed under a rock in a zip lock bag, but it’s still a mystery!

 Then there’s the square of doubled up and hidden rawhide under a ledge with half an eyeglass lens inside……

An old man at the Rogerson store showed me the five, twenty dollar gold pieces he found wrapped in twisted fence wire, buried in the foundation of a line shack….no dates are visible and he’s resisted unwrapping them for sixty years to look!

Everybody loves a mystery.