The events described in this story took place during the winter months of 1967 or 1968, probably during the Christmas break. A college buddy and I decided to take a trip to the desert to see if we could find the gold described in my father’s lost gold mine story dating from the time of the Great Depression. While we were mainly interested in finding a large cache of gold and getting rich, we were also very aware of many “stories of power” associated with the uninhabited desert regions of the western United States. The destination for our trip further enhanced the feeling of mystery and power because in addition to stories of gold, it has many ancient rock art drawings called petroglyphs on hundreds of rocks in the area. I have always been drawn to these examples of art, finding them to be totally inscrutable, but clearly of great importance to the artist. The origins of the petroglyphs are completely unknown other than that they are extremely old (possibly several thousand years old). According to the local natives in the area, they were created by “the ancient ones” for some unknown purpose. The mystery and intrigue of the area was very much evident to my friend and me as we set up camp and proceeded to search for the lost gold.
My father’s “lost gold mine story” started on a summer day in the early 1930’s. My father worked as a waiter for a “poor farm” in Marin County, California. One morning my father’s friend, the cook, got a call from the hospital in San Francisco informing him that his elderly uncle was dying and wanted to see him. Since the hospital was only about 30 miles away, the two of them went to see the dying uncle. It turned out that the old man had a story about a lost gold mine that he wanted to pass on before he died.
The story, as I recall it, is that the uncle and his partner had been prospecting along the Whipple Mountains next to the Colorado River, approximately 40 miles south of Needles and a little north of Vidal Junction. When the days started to heat up at the approach of the hot summer months, the two prospectors packed up their mules and wagon and headed toward the coast a couple hundred miles to the west. After traveling for a couple of days they headed due west up a wash toward the some mountain peaks when their water barrel fell off of their wagon and broke. This put them into a bit a fix because it had already gotten too hot to travel in the desert without water and it was too far to go back to the river. They continued up the narrow wash (dry creek bed) hoping to find water, when they came upon a fresh water spring shaded by desert palm trees. They named it “Two Palm Springs” because of these trees. That solved their immediate problem, but since they no longer had a barrel, it didn’t solve the larger problem of getting out of the desert. They decided to take short trips into the desert hoping to find the next source of water. While doing that, they came upon an area that was covered with geodes (round rocks with a hollow, crystal lined center). The area had so many of them that it made it difficult to walk. Past that they spotted a rock arch. Under the arch they found gold! Somehow, the uncle’s partner died and was buried on a small ledge near the spring. The uncle managed to get across the desert to the ocean, but didn’t ever get back to the gold. Sometime later he became sick and ended up in the hospital, where my father met him and heard the story. Shortly after my father and his friend visited the uncle, the old man died. So, being young men in the middle of the Great Depression, the two of them jumped into my dad’s car and headed to the desert in search of gold.
They drove to Needles, turned south on the road toward Vidal Junction, spotted the mountain peaks as described by the old man, took a trail west toward the peaks, went up the wash, and found the spring, with a cross marking a grave behind the spring. They figured that with this much of the story being true, they were almost rich! However, the story didn’t have enough details to help them take the next step. They spent a few days hiking through the barren, rocky, mountains looking for the mine, but were not successful. They did find signs of early man in the form of broken pottery near the spring and dozens of enigmatic petroglyphs pecked into rocks a few miles to the west on the far side of the mountain. More interestingly, they climbed up a cliff going to the top of a mesa and partway up came to a ledge with a cave behind it. There were desert sheep horns on the ledge. They went into the cave, but had no lights so couldn’t go very far because it was too dark.
They spent a week or so searching for the gold without success. Since this was the middle of summer and extremely hot, the two green horns got smart and high tailed it back home where my father’s fiancée (my mother) was waiting. Following that brief excursion to the desert, my dad got married, had kids, and was unable to return until twenty or so years later when I was about seven years old.
When I was six or seven, we finally made a return trip, and then made it a family tradition to take week long trips during the cool seasons of Christmas or Easter vacation to search for the lost gold. We never found gold (or the cave), but we found a lot of other interesting things. We found many signs of early man, found what my father called an early Spanish mine that looked like a rectangular hole in the ground to me, but it did appear to be man-made. After a few years of exploring the area, my father contacted the Museum of Man in San Diego concerning the artifacts that we had found. The curator, Dr. Davies, of the museum joined us on a few of our winter vacations. Dr. Davies was very impressed and excited with the things that we had found because archeologists had never found such artifacts in that part of the desert. Our discoveries filled in a blank in the archeology maps.
During the fall of 1967 I had been telling my college friend stories about the desert and the lost gold mine. When Christmas break came, we took his VW bus, his beagle dog “Amigo,” and headed south to check it out.
We took the highway south of Needles, finally finding the unmarked turn-off to the peaks. We followed the rough dirt track across the flat desert floor to the head of the canyon leading to Two Palm Springs. That was our first major decision point because the wash was rocky with a very sandy bottom. I had always used a four-wheel drive vehicle for this road. All we had this time was the two-wheel drive bus. We were faced with the possibility of being stuck in the sand many miles from civilization. Being young college kids, instead of pondering the possible results we just drove right on in – it all worked out just fine. We drove a couple of miles up the wash to the end of the road and set up camp close to the springs. I was amazed at how well that bus did in the rough and rugged desert country. It seemed that if a jeep could make it, so could the bus.
The springs were in good shape, and full of clear water. There had recently been a fire that had burned several of the palm trees, allowing more water than usual to fill the small pond. Someone had hauled in some galvanized pipe as if they were going to “improve” the spring, but had done nothing other than carry the pipe to the area. There was much evidence of animals using this spring, including big horned desert sheep that live on the steep hills in the area.
While exploring a rocky canyon below the springs we came upon old, rusted barrel hoops. When I saw them I recalled that my father’s story included a discussion that the original prospector’s barrel of water had fallen from their wagon and broken to pieces. When I saw these metal hoops sticking out of the sand and rocks in the river bottom I got pretty excited because they might be the hoops from the prospectors’ broken barrel, and that I was finally finding physical evidence to support the old prospector’s story.
I told my friend that my family had thoroughly explored much of the country to the south of the springs, we should concentrate our efforts searching to the north. After walking a short distance, we came upon an area covered with small, two to three inch diameter geodes. There were hundreds, and possibly thousands, of them littering the surface of a small rolling hill. This got me pretty excited because afield of geodes was another element in my father’s story. Previously, my father had expressed his opinion that since we had never found them, the geodes must have been part of a myth and weren’t an important element of the description on how to find the gold. I think my father had begun to doubt the entire story by then because of all of the years that we scoured the desert looking for clues and finding none. Now we had found the field of geodes, adding a bit more credibility to the original story.
My father’s story indicted that after passing through the bed of geodes we should see an arch. We started searching for an arch on the cliffs, wondered what type of arch we were looking for. One type of arch has a clear space under it that you can see through to the sky beyond. Another type of arch is a place on surface of a cliff, looking a bit like a relief of an arch carved on a rock wall. I had no idea which type of arch we might be looking for until we turned a corner and saw an arch very near the top of a high (3,000 foot or so) cliff-like mountain to our right. The blue sky was clearly visible though the arch from where we stood.
We were getting pretty excited by now. The next task was to decide what was meant by “under the arch.” The most obvious answer was inside of the arch itself, directly under the arching rocks. That meant a difficult climb up a steep and rugged, bolder strewn mountain. The mountains in this area are just bare rocks with very little vegetation beyond a bit of grass here and there with a few small shrubs living in between the boulders and rocks. We headed up the mountain and finally got to the top, slowly working our way over to the arch.
The arch turned out to be about eight feet wide and about six feet tall at the highest part. It was made from a brown colored, volcanic material. There was nothing under the arch except for a flat rocky surface. We looked around for awhile, but could find nothing that indicated the presence of gold or any other unusual substance. However, while we found no gold, the view from up there was magnificent! You could see across the hazy blue desert to the Whipple Mountains and the Colorado River to the east, the entire layout of the southern portion of the mountain ridge, and the great flat valleys surrounding the barren mountains.
We sat down to enjoy the view. I became transfixed. Not just a little transfixed, but totally and completely transfixed – I slid into a trance that lasted for what might have been minutes, or hours; I have no way of knowing. My mind just stopped functioning as we sat and sat, staring at nothing in particular. I had stopped talking, stopped moving, and stopped thinking!
After a very long time my mind slowly formed a tiny thought that not only had I stopped thinking, I could not move. I was stuck on the top of the mountain, under the arch. With considerable difficulty I managed to speak enough to my friend to ask what he was experiencing. He slowly spoke as if from a great distance that he had stopped thinking and could not move. Awakening from this very odd, and frightening situation we both jumped up and started running down the mountainside to get out of that “haunted” place. The hill that we ran down was more of a cliff than a hill, strewn with giant boulders and other dangers. However, neither of us took heed of the danger; we just ran as fast as we could, jumping from rock to rock – hoping that we wouldn’t slip or knock a large rock loose to crush us on the way down. We finally made it to the bottom, and after catching our breaths decided that we would avoid that place in the future.
I have never experienced a place with so much power that felt like it could suck me entirely into it. I felt that I was caught completely; my entire being was under its spell. Since then I have returned to the arch one more time out of curiosity and found nothing unusual, just a bunch of brown colored rocks. It seems to have been both a time and a place that was important.
I still have a question about what is meant by “under the arch.” From up on the hill, all of the mountain below us could be considered “under” the arch since they are all below the arch. I have spent many hours looking in this area along the gravely wash, but have found nothing. Not only do I not know what was meant by “under the arch,” but I have no clue about the form of the gold. Is it ore? Is it placer gold mixed with small particles in sand? Does it consist of chunks of gold? Is it a lost Spanish treasure? As far as I know, the gold is still in “them thar hills.”
I told my father about this new find, and that of course sparked another trip to the desert. This time he took along a friend of his from where he worked. We found the geodes again, and went back to the arch, but found no gold. Sometime later his friend returned with a truck and picked up all of the geodes (his form of “gold” since they were worth about a dollar each). He picked them all up, and the next time I was there that landmark was completely gone.