Day 76: Sequoia National Park to Calico, CA

After an amazing sleep - it was the perfect sleeping temperature last night - we were packed up and on the road by 7am. We opted to backtrack along the northern route, back towards Fresno and then on to Bakersfield, since the roads were better this way. After getting out of the mountains, we drove through citrus groves as far as the eye could see. Workers were harvesting oranges and we saw mountains of them picked and being sent to the fruit processing plants that lined the highway. We drove by a Sunkist orange factory alongside several others.

One of many enormous orange groves.

We passed absolutely huge solar farms.

Massive wind turbines lined the hills.

We soon traded fruit farms for vast solar and wind farms. And then we entered the Mojave Desert where instead of sand dunes as Ali expected, we saw fields of small bushes with huge Joshua trees scattered throughout. We passed a huge open pit borate mine (the mineral used in Borax laundry soap and in cell phone screens) and the military’s Edwards Air Force Base built into the side of a mountain James Bond-style (this was where they first broke the sound barrier). Then the temperature began to soar. We inched up, up, up topping out at a whopping 42 degrees Celsius. While locals assured us that this is nothing (apparently it gets up to 51 degrees here!), 42 felt incredibly hot. We were a bit shocked to get out of the air conditioned truck and begin breathing in the sweltering air and sweating profusely. I suspect it will take our bodies some time to adapt to this new climate.

We arrived in short order to Calico where we checked in to our campground, dropped off the trailer and headed up to visit the reconstructed Calico Ghost Town. Like Bodie, this had once been a booming silver mining town in the 1880s with a population of 3,000 at its peak. Most of the buildings (except four) have since burned down and a Main Street has been reconstructed by a family connected to a local amusement park to give visitors an idea of what the town would have looked like. It now featured buildings like a general store, black smith shop, bath house, restaurant, city hall, museum, saloon, and candy shop. Almost all the buildings are now tourist shops inside. We walked in and out of all the buildings to escape the heat and then, after about an hour, retreated back to our air conditioned trailer.

At 6:30 pm, we headed back up to the now closed ghost town to meet our tour guides, Daryl and Dan, for a private tour of the Silver King Mine. We weren’t sure that to expect from the tour. I had found it online - it had a great website - but there were no set tour times; I had had to call a number and book a custom tour that was only available in the evening after the guides finished their day jobs. We met the guides in the town’s restaurant - we were very grateful for the AC - for an introductory history lesson and then headed up the mountain and into one of several visible portals (entrances) into the mine.

The boys checking out a mine car toilet.

These are the pieces of ore the miners would have been digging out of the mountain.

The “motel” where new miners would sleep in a rock pocket with a wooden door upon arriving to Calico until they could get accommodation sorted out.

Here we go!

We were guided along adit #6 (a horizontal mine shaft) and learned from the guides as much as they have been able to piece together from their explorations of the various mine shafts about how the silver mining operations worked from the 1880s to the 1930s. This tour focused completely on the mining part of the operation which was the perfect complement to the silver and gold stamping and processing information we learned a few weeks ago in Bodie.

We carefully picked our way deep into the mountain along various mine shafts, avoiding open vertical pits (sometimes 250 feet deep) called winzes, where wooden 2x4 ladders connected the different levels of the mine. We crossed many fault lines where deposits of silver had been laid down over millions of years in the cracks between the volcanic rock. We were actually able to see remaining silver deposits in the walls and ceilings as black splotches in the rock. 

The many different tunnels looked like a haphazard honey comb of holes inside the mountain, often connected by an subfloor made of overlapping trees cut in half and laid flat to hold up tons of rock. It was pretty nuts. There was a rail on the floor of the tunnel where workers used to manually push a 750 pound mine cart loaded with ore out of the mine. The boys tried to push it with minimal success - it was heavy!

The miners would have been working by candle light and in the early days were digging the holes to pack with dynamite by hand. We each got the chance to try chiselling out a dynamite hole (hammer, turn pick, hammer, turn pick); it was not easy.

We were underground for close to 2 hours. The boys loved it. They were fascinated by the whole experience and the feeling of danger without it being dangerous. The guides were both firemen (one real and one volunteer) with tons of experience inside the mine, so we were completely safe. The guides were careful to educate us about all the dangers of mines and were very clear with the boys about the realities of the peril of exploring unknown mines. They shared stories of the mine rescues they had participated in with both tragic and positive outcomes.

The passion and knowledge of the guides was clearly evident and made for a very high quality tour. After not knowing exactly what to expect, we were very pleased with the least touristy adventure we have done so far on the trip. We found out at the tour’s end that the guides only give two or so tours of the mine each year! We felt really privileged to have experienced a piece of history so unique that not many people nowadays have had a chance to see up close.