The Gold Park Mining District is about 9 miles south of 29 Palms just outside of the Joshua Tree National Park. Whenever it came time to prospect, well it was off to this district that we would go. Over the years my father and Orin Booth had discussed the area and the fact that alot of the gold was missed due to the size of what veins were visable. Most of the surface veins are 2-3 inches wide and don’t show much mineralization. Many of these veins only go down about a foot or two and just stop. One of my friends, Ron Bassler, who lived next door to me would go up to Gold Park every weekend. Well I find out that his grandfather lived up there and was working 2 mines along with his 2 sons, one of those being Ron’s dad. So on the weekends that we didn’t go mining at the Joel or prospecting, my father let me go with Ron and his dad out to Gold Park. Ron’s grandpa would let us ride the ore car down and fill with material and Ron and I would switch off ringing the bell. The earth in Gold Park is very fractured up so it has to be completely cribbed in so as to avoid cave ins. We would spend the nite with grandpa and he always told us stories about the old mining days. I’ll be sharing some of those in the coming months.

The following picture is one of our mines that we worked in the 1980′s. Jeff, George, Butch were my partners. The ore was high grade but would only come up in pockets of 3-6 tons and then disappear.

Vandals decided to burn it to the ground one day and that pretty much ended that mines future.

This next picture is of grandpa Bassler’s cabin. Its across the wash and up the hill a little ways.

Again, vandals burned it to the ground.

Thats all for tonite. I will continue to discuss Gold Park for we had 2 mines in the area and a very large rare earth deposit that my father had discovered.

I have friends, that live in the Orange County area of California, that not only think but are convinced that my deck of cards have been shuffled to many times. First off, they can not understand why we live out in the middle of nowhere. I tell them that we are within a 45 minute drive of all the big stores and we don’t have to put up with the traffic.
Well I’ve been getting cabin fever for about a week now and I finally convinced myself that if I left early enough in the morning that I could get 3 or 4 hours work done in our placer hole. So I call up my partner, Doc, and convinced him too that we could do it(just a side note here, I’m trying to pick up my 52 cards today).
So off we go to the mine and get there at 5am ready to hit it. Now we knew we had alot of overburden to move so we jumped on that first thing. Well by 7:30am we were ready to start mining. After a short break, I started in the main hole and Doc started work on a new hole. I filled 6 buckets with material and ran them thru the drywasher and got ready to pan. Now all of a sudden I realized that it was down right hot out and that there was not a bee in site. I checked the tempeture and it was 101 degrees at 8:45am. I panned the cons and got 4 small pickers and about 1/4 inch of fines.
Well Doc and I continued this mad form of mining til noon when the tempeture got to 118 degrees. It was at this point that the both of us realized we were just plain crazy and needed to go home. It’s hell mining in the desert in the summer. It seems that the printing on the hi-lited picture did not come to clear. The black areas are where we removed the overburden and the yellow area is the gold bearing zone.