Loafing Along Death Valley Trails, by William Caruthers

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Do have links or means to connect to your writings about Death Valley?

I used to have a substantial website of my own until about 2013. That had a lot of my writings in general, which included some emphasis on Death Valley. My area of interest and writing focus was the Great Basin in general, the Eastern Sierra in particular.

I don’t know if it’s still offered, but the video GHOST TOWNS OF DEATH VALLEY was offered for years at the visitor center and other regional locations. I participated in that video with on camera interviews as well as sharing my historic photo collection, which were used. Other popular authors, such as Stan Paher, Susan Sorrels (of Shoshone and descendent of Charles Brown, a former law man from Greenwater who settled in Shoshone and became a state senator) and others. My participation was shot in the museum at Trona in 2000. The producers had hopes to sell to the History Channel, but that didn’t happen.

I co-authored WESTERN PLACES: SKIDOO! with Alan Patera. He and I did a lot of travels together and I helped with research on many of his WESTERN PLACES series. The visitor center should have copies for sale, or order from Alan’s website. I also did substantial research work on WESTERN PLACES: FUNERAL RANGE for several years before Alan published it. Other DV region books that Alan and I worked on are WESTERN PLACES: HORNSILVER (Gold Point) and WESTERN PLACES: GOLD MOUNTAIN.

I published several articles; including one on traversing the Panamint Range via Goler Canyon, Mengel Pass and Butte Valley; on DesertUSA and they’re still online. Just search my name on their site (David A. Wright). Another article on that site is a multiple part one of a trip that Alan Patera, along with Death Valley Hiker’s Association president at the time, George Huxtable, took in the spring of 1999. George was along for the Death Valley part of the trip; Alan and I also continued on to southeastern Nevada then central Nevada to tour and camp at various ghost towns. The Death Valley section covered Keane Springs, Chloride City, Chloride Cliff, the Capricorn Mine, Lee, Lee, NV, and Echo.

You’ll like GHOSTS OF THE GLORY TRAIL. Murbarger spent substantial time at each historic site she visited, often weeks or more; each chapter is in depth and not just a summary. It is Nevada focused, but also includes Utah and California ghost towns and the last inhabitants. Nel Murbarger camped and stayed at numerous ghost towns in the 1930s and 1940s before becoming a prolific contributor to Desert Magazine. Her Death Valley efforts were mainly in the Tule Canyon area of the northernmost part, as well as Gold Point. She has a companion book, SOVEREIGNS OF THE SAGE, which includes historic sites not included in the other book. Her photos are worth the price of the book. I found a hardbound copy of GHOSTS with a page long note written by and signed by Murbarger to the original owner; which I picked up at Dawson’s book store in Portland for $5 in 2002 while my wife and I were spending a few days with Alan Patera and his wife. He’s a night owl, so we were in the store after midnight. I also have a paperback version of the book.

I also have hundreds of photos on ghosttowns.com. That site and Desert USA were my earliest online efforts starting in 1998 until I started building my website around 1999. And the great grandfather of this forum, Death-Valley.us, was a place that many of us authors and historians met and collaborated and shared information. I don’t know if the archives include those topics from that far back, more than two decades ago.

Before then, my writing endeavors were for hardcopy publications. Primarily I contributed heavily to THE ALBUM, published by the former Chalfant Press in Bishop; my writings published between 1989 and 1995. It was a quarterly historical publication and was popular. In 1995 Chalfant sold out to a syndicate who was only interested in the newspapers published by Chalfant and they killed off the books and THE ALBUM. About the same time I met Alan Patera and collaborated with him for more than a decade. I’ve also been published in several other periodicals, such as TOURING BIKE magazine, NEVADA MAGAZINE, COLLECTIBLE AUTOMOBILE and the Inyo Register newspaper out of Bishop. I started writing about 1984.