The Lost Goldmine Trail, and the location of all that gold

Sunday was another beautiful day, and about 15 degrees cooler than Saturday. I went for a drive down Peralta road, because I hadn't been out that way for a few months. There was a lot of traffic; cars, trucks, and ATVs. A lot of people were leaving the Peralta trailhead. I guess most people start their hikes earlier in the day than I do, and they were done hiking and were heading home or to lunch. I stopped at the Lost Goldmine trailhead and read once again about the legend of the Lost Dutchman's gold. The gold was lost, not the Dutchman, and he wasn't Dutch; he was German. Next I stopped at what is now the Carney Springs trailhead. It was such a pretty day, and I didn't have to be anywhere else, so I got my back pack and started walking. I headed west on the Lost Goldmine trail when I got to it. Before I knew it, I was at the mine. Just kidding.

I told myself that I wasn't going to take any pictures of The Three Sisters because I already have so many, but you know how that goes.

Turns out that if you found the mine, you couldn't go in it to get the gold anyway. ;-)

As I strolled along, I thought about the lost mine. Thousands of people have spent over 100 years searching for the mine, and many have died. I keep an eye out for it whenever I'm in the Superstition Mountains, but I haven't spotted it yet. Then I thought that maybe I should get some of the maps floating around to increase the odds that I would find it. Then I thought that lots of other people have thought that, and look how successful they've been. So the logical conclusion is that I'm better probably better off without any maps. Then again, maybe I should get some maps so I know where NOT to look, because thousands of people have already looked in those places. My Dad once accused me of thinking too much.

I like walking through here. You feel like you're in a really dense saguaro forest.

I took lots of pictures of saguaros, with mountains in the background of most of them.

So now I know where to look, which is in the places that everybody else hasn't looked yet. I think that's probably a lot of places. I've checked two or three of them already. Gettin' closer.

Next, I thought about what I would do if I found it. Well, supposedly there's a curse on it and I might wind up dead. That wouldn't make finding it worthwhile. If I found it and word got out (might be hard to cover up selling a bunch of gold), then there would be no more legend and that would spoil a lot of people's fun. They would have to make up other excuses to wander off into the desert, unprepared, in the summer heat.

If you look at enough saguaros, you're going to find a few that look strange.

So I decided that if I do find it, there's only one thing to do. Keep it a secret. I won't even tell My Sweetums.

Dead trees almost always look interesting.

So if you don't read a blog post in which I claim to have found the mine, then you know for a fact that I have or haven't found it. Hmm, that kind of correlates with my strategy for finding it in the first place, sort of. Click below to see all of the pictures. Oh, and remind me to tell you about my plan for finding hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of meteorites.

2012_02_12