Category Archives: Desert

Hike To Stubbe Springs

March 14, 2013

About two years ago I conned Tom Mahood into hiking to the Captain Jinks Mine in the Hexie Mountains at the eastern end of Joshua Tree National Park.  As part of the research for that hike, we identified two other remote mines in that area, the Ruby Lee Mine and the Combination Mine.  We had been planning a stupidly long hike to see these mines, requiring a car shuttle, but the weather has warmed up a lot lately and this one might have to wait until fall.  Still, we had set a day for the hike, so what else to do?

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Cary’s Castle

February 5, 2013

Tom Mahood spent nearly all of last year in New Mexico, so I had a slight respite from joining him on his crazed hikes searching for Bill Ewasko (see posts elsewhere on this blog), but as his time there was waning in late summer, I started getting “I have ideas” emails and he started refering to the coming cooler months as “Ewasko Season.”  Desperate to distract him, I came up with the idea of searching for some of the odder things associated with Cary’s Castle.  He bit, but merely added it to the hiking agenda.  Instead of replacing Ewasko hikes, this was to be in addition to.

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Mud Caves Search

April 11-12, 2012

RMRU got a call from Riverside Sheriff’s Office requesting our assistance with a search in San Diego County.  A young man, Guillermo Pino, had gone missing while camping with friends in the Mud Caves area in Arroyo Tapiado, part of Anza Borrego Desert State Park.  Glenn Henderson and I were the only RMRU personnel available for this mid-week search.  RMRU had brought in Fernando Moreira, a professional tracking instructor, to teach a class the following weekend, so Fernando cam along with us.

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My Clinic In The Mojave

2 February, 2012

I’m working a kind of odd job doing two-week stints once a month as a contract civilian PA at Fort Irwin supporting Brigade Combat Teams that rotate through there for pre-deployment training.  Not your typical PA job, but the best hourly rate I’ve made since I worked in IT.

I have to admit that it seems a little odd to (knowingly) treat patients carrying automatic weapons.

Aid Station at the Rotational Unit Bivouac Area

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Finding Norman in Death Valley

March 20, 2011

As detailed in my post about my involvement in the final chapter (really the final postscript) of finding the Death Valley Germans, I became somewhat involved with the ever-curious escapades of one Mr. Tom Mahood.  It’s been downhill ever since.

Jack Freer, a law enforcement officer from Carson City, Nevada, later contacted RMRU looking for Tom and I put the two in touch.  Jack had taken an interest in a Carson City resident, Norman Cox, who had abandoned his car at Badwater in Death Valley, left a suicide note, then vanished.  The subsequent search turned up no body.  This was in August, 2010.

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Hike To Captain Jinks Mine

Both Linda Green’s 1984 Historic Resources Report for Joshua Tree National Park and the 1961 California Department of Mines and Geology report for Riverside County listed several mines in the Hexie Mountains as being so remote they were never visited.  That really intrigued me, as seldom-visited mines bring to mind relatively undisturbed sites.  Google Earth showed small sections of what once had been a road, though the Jinks (sometimes spelled Jenks) mine was said to date back to the late 1800’s.  The Ruby Lee and Combination mines had never really been much more than prospects, so held less interest.  I emailed the DzrtGrls and when Jamie got back to me that this was even a bit too remote for them, I was hooked.

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