Death Valley 2022/23

[DAW89446]

Obviously the area was heavily prospected for minerals.  Insane amounts of labor were poured into… finding very little apparently in the areas we were in.  Loads of short shafts in hard tick less than 6ft deep.  

Very oddly the area is LITTERED with cairns.  I have never seen this many cairns.  Every tiny ridge line had multiple cairns on it. Every minor peak.  Every undulation of landscape.  I can only guess that a group of miners was prospecting and marking off every bit of real estate with a cairn as they checked it.  ...

... Interesting little “cabin”.  Likely very pleasant in the summer.  

During the 1902-1907 era prospecting became frenzied as the nation came down with "Tonopah Fever." The prospecting fever quickly spread to the south and into Death Valley and surrounding country. In my research in the Inyo County courthouse, I've worn out my eyeballs going through huge 10# books of handwritten documents of mine claims from all over the county, especially Death Valley and vicinity. Some individual's claims took several dozens to a hundred or more pages, filled with vague locations and boundaries that they had staked out on the ground, likely with those very same cairns. W.L. Hunter, of Hunter Mountain and Beveridge fame along with his brother Bev, was county recorder in most of those years, and he had deplorable handwriting that is very hard to read. Oddly, he went to using a typewriter when those newfangled devices came into use, but then reverted back to his horrible handwriting.

I was thinking that your interesting little cabin might be a good candidate for Camp Holdout, Walter Scott's hideaway, but checking Lingenfelter's DEATH VALLEY & THE AMARGOSA, Camp Holdout was simply a shelf under an overhang not far from the Confidence Mine.