Despite their large footprint (70 miles/110 km north to south) and high altitude (peaking at 11,123 ft/3390 m), the Inyo Mountains are receive far less attention than the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains, which are larger in both footprint and altitude. The Inyos lie across the Owens Valley from the Sierras in Eastern California and define the northwestern edge of Death Valley National Park. The Inyos have no paved roads, no maintained hiking trails, and little visitation. They do, however, contain an excellent record of California’s mining past.

Like most places in the United States, the Inyos were first explored by the Native Americans. According to Death Valley to Yosemite by Belden and DeDecker, the Paiute-Shoshone coined the name "Inyos," which meant "the dwelling place of the great spirit." From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, many mining camps were established and then waned in the Inyo Mountains. The largest was Cerro Gordo, which reached a population of 1,500 in 1869 and can be accessed by 4WD vehicle today. There is adequate discussion of Cerro Gordo elsewhere on the Internet and in books, so it won’t be my focus here. The second largest town was Beveridge, which was so inaccessible that it has been largely forgotten. Its ruins remain with only minimal perturbation. There were another dozen mining camps high in the Inyos, and a few dozen scattered around the base of the mountain range, and they are preserved to varying degrees.

The steep terrain, lack of water, lack of lumber, high altitude, and cold winters made human inhabitation of the Inyo Mountains difficult. But there was gold, so dedicated miners created paths, brought in supplies using mules, and built settlements. When they left, their equipment remained. If one has a willingness to spend hours in 4WD vehicles followed by days hiking (often off-trail) over steep passes, carrying gallons of water, and bushwhacking through thorn bushes, one can still find the buildings, mines, and mills. Steam engines and tramways, cabins and stamp mills remain in the bottoms of canyons, awaiting the dedicated hiker.

Below is some documentation of this isolated bit of history. The photos are from multiple trips, though predominantly from a November 2022 hike on the Lonesome Miner Trail with fellow adventurer Victor Yee. The sections of this writeup are ordered roughly from south to north, which is the direction I hiked the Lonesome Miner Trail. The photos on this webpage are mine unless otherwise noted.

Lone Pine and the Sierras, with wildfire smoke blowing past Mt. Whitney, as viewed from the New York Butte area.

Sunrise on Mt. Whitney as viewed from the Inyo Crest

Ancient Bristlecone Pines are mostly found in the White Mountains, but there also are some at high altitudes in the Inyo Mountains. This gnarled Bristlecone, which is likely thousands of years old, has both living and dead growths.

The unique purple bristlecones of the tree in the prior photo.

Owens Lake in June 2023 after being refilled by the winter's record rains.

The Lonesome Miner Trail

The Lonesome Miner Trail (LMT) is a roughly 40-mile route with 25,000 ft of elevation gain and 23,000 ft of loss (65 km, +7700 -6900 m) that traverses and crosses the Inyo Mountains. The endpoints of the trail are in the Owens Valley and Saline Valley, which necessitates a long car shuttle. Each day’s journey on the trail climbs over a ridge from one valley to the next, and in this way Hunter Canyon, Beveridge Canyon, McElvoy Canyon, and Pat Keyes Canyon are connected. There are historical ruins in each of these.

In the 1980s, Wendell Moyer did a number of hikes in the Inyo Mountains and rediscovered many trail segments left by the miners. During the early 1990s, he was joined by members of the Sierra Club’s Desert Peaks Section, and they were supported by the Ridgecrest BLM Office. Moyer and Steve Smith, the Ridgecrest BLM’s Chief of Resources, led a number of trips to link together the trail segments, stabilize the cabins, and re-establish trail sections that had washed out. Moyer named the route the “Lonesome Miner Trail” and died in 1995, and plaques commemorating him were placed in 1996. Intermittent trail work continued into the early 2000s, when the BLM changed management and lost interest in turning the route into an Inyos version of the John Muir Trail. Rock slides occurred, bushes grew, the springs reduced in volume, and traffic waned.

I learned of the Lonesome Miner Trail while doing research for my 2020 Beveridge Hike. It sounded crazy—the route just goes straight up and down the canyon walls! But after I finished hiking the Sierra High Route¹ in 2021, I knew that my next project would be the LMT. Victor and I returned to the Inyos and hiked it over six days in November 2022. We intended to hike it earlier, but I sprained my ankle, and we delayed to give me more time to heal. The season’s first snow fell a few days before we started, and this made the north-facing trail sections hard to follow and slippery. Each night’s temperature was in the mid-20s F (around -4 C), and we were not prepared for snow camping, so we were pretty cold.

Even without the snow, the trail quality ranges from poor to nonexistent. We frequently wandered off the trail and then had to backtrack to find it again. There are numerous sections that involved scrambling up scree or boulder-hopping in talus. Judging from the logbook entries, interest in the Lonesome Miner Trail exploded since the pandemic. More people are exploring outdoors now, and ultra-running has increased in popularity. According to the logbooks, a woman named Kimberly Gardner ran a variant of the LMT over a dozen times in 2021 and 2022, and she ultimately set the fastest known time on it: 18 hours! The trail traffic decreased in the early 2000s, but it seems there is now a renaissance in interest. Despite this, the chances of meeting anyone on the LMT remain extremely low.

Footnotes:
¹The Sierra High Route (SHR) is a 250-300-mile route in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California. It roughly parallels the John Muir trail, but it is mostly off-trail and significantly higher in altitude. The route involves navigating oneself from one mountain pass to the next. I jokingly describe the Sierra High Route as "the John Muir Trail for people who hate people." Whereas I counted 35 people hiking a remote section of the JMT in the span of three hours, encountering anyone on an off-trail section of the SHR is a significant event. Return.

At the trailhead, about to start. Many thanks to Kurt Lawson for being our Saline Valley taxi!

For logistical reasons, Victor and I hiked from south to north even though it resulted in somewhat greater elevation gain. Saline Valley is one of the most remote places in California, and the trailhead was about 40 miles (60 km) from the nearest paved road. A large number of tin cans and scattered rusty debris indicated that there was once a camp at the trailhead, but no structures remained. The topo map calls this area the Vega Mine.

As we ascended, Saline Dry Lake came into view. As discussed in the Section 9, a tramway was constructed starting in 1911 so salt could be harvested from here and then transported over the mountain range to the Owens Valley.

The first area of artifacts we encountered on the LMT was a flat platform containing several bed frames carved into the mountain a couple thousand feet above the valley floor. I imagine that a large tent would have sat on the platform.

We encountered the first of many ammo boxes containing a logbook and emergency supplies. Victor digitized the logbook, and it can be viewed here.

I walked around the corner and found more beds. I believe that behind them is the (now collapsed) mine.

The miners left behind their spices and a still-readable Folger’s can.

We continued up the mountain. There were remnants of more cabins near the crest of the trail. Neither this area nor the platform with the beds had any water sources, so constant mule trains would have needed to carry in water.

Cabin remnants near where the trail crests the ridge and begins descending into Hunter Canyon.

Photos by Victor.

We crested the mountain and obtained our first view into Hunter Canyon just as the sun set. Surprisingly, there was another ammo box containing a logbook atop this ridge. Victor rapidly digitized it, and it is posted here. We very hurriedly hiked down and arrived at the canyon bottom just as it became dark. Since we were not yet accustomed to sleeping in 25 F (-4 C) temperatures, both of us slept rather poorly and spent several hours awake, too cold to return to sleep.

On our first day of the Lonesome Miner Trail, we hiked from the Saline Valley to Hunter Canyon. This was 6.1 miles with 5040 ft of gain and 1470 ft of loss (9.8 km, +1540 m, -450 m), which took us 8.5 hours. The distances and elevation changes were recorded by my GPS but pinned to the terrain, so the distances are pretty accurate and the elevation changes are less than the true values due to smoothing of the terrain. The daily durations are measured from putting on the backpack in the morning to taking it off at the end of the day, so they include stops.

The camping spot was basically between two steam engine boilers. Judging by the wheels on the left boiler in the image below, it probably produced steam and converted it into motion, whereas the boiler on the right only produced steam. With Infinite Toil, the PhD dissertation of Karen Swope, notes that a boiler was packed to here in 1885, so presumably it's one of these. In the bushes on the left was a 3-4 ft (1 m) diameter gear. The stamp mill that the steam engines would have powered was gone; it likely was moved to a mining area elsewhere. Death Valley to Yosemite reports that this area was most active from 1877 to 1893, though there was occasional activity afterward.

At the Bighorn Spring campsite was another logbook. Victor digitized it, and it can be viewed here.

Just below the boilers, a tunnel cut into the bushes provided access to the (quite good) stream. Without this tunnel, water access would be extremely difficult.

The nails weren’t the square blacksmithed ones, so they must have been newer than 1800s-vintage.

The Bulldozer Road

The unofficially-named "Bulldozer Road" starts at the Inyo Crest near the Burgess Mine, switchbacks down Craig Canyon, climbs north over the ridge, descends Hunter Canyon, and ends a half mile (1 km) above Bighorn Spring. It is not part of the Lonesome Miner Trail, but I'm it here. The road most likely was constructed in the 1960s or 1970s by an optimistic miner who probably ran out of money and abandoned the project before actually making use of the road. The Bulldozer Road is loose, steep, and has extremely tight switchbacks. There are no artifacts at the end of it, which suggests it never was used for mining, but there is a logbook. The road is not on the 1951 USGS topo map, but it is present on the 1987 one, so it was constructed during this interval. A logbook entry notes that it was disused and needed to be "reopened" in 1987. The BLM closed the Bulldozer Road to vehicles in the early 1990s, likely because people kept getting epically stuck at the bottom.

In June 2023, fellow adventure photographer Matthew Saville I hiked the Bulldozer Road, connected with the LMT, spent a night photographing the milky way over the Bighorn Cabin, and then returned by the same route. The hike was steep; we recorded 17,000 ft of elevation change over 18 miles.

The Bulldozer Road had a nearly constant slope, and there were beautiful wildflowers after the record-breaking wet winter.

A geologist would probably get excited about this boulder that was alongside the Bulldozer Road.

The upper part of Hunter Canyon was huge, open, and flat, and we were rather surprised to see no cabin remnants or mine tailings at all.

The Lonesome Miner Trail continued down Hunter Canyon before hooking around a bluff and beginning the long, steep climb to Survivor Ridge, which separates Hunter Canyon from Beveridge Canyon.

The photo above shows the view looking up Hunter Canyon, and the photo below shows the view down it. The smokestack of the campsite is barely visible in the center of the above photo.

When I hiked this section in 2023, I spotted two rattlesnakes in ten minutes. When I returned through the same section the next day, I walked slowly, carefully checking around my feet for snakes, and then was startled to find this whipsnake sticking vertically out of a bush at chest height. This was not a defensive posture, and it allowed me to take photos. It was either sunning itself in a very odd way or else trying to catch flying insects.

As we ascended, we found increasing numbers of artifacts.

A bit under two thirds of the way up to Survivor Ridge, we encountered the Bighorn Mine complex. This was one of the most interesting areas on the entire LMT, and I returned here on a one-night backpack in spring 2023.

Gold was discovered by William L. Hunter (the namesake of Hunter Canyon) at what became the Bighorn Mine in the late 1870s, and it was among the first mines in the area. Copper, lead, and silver were also mined there. The ores were processed in steam-powered arrastras that were in place in Hunter Canyon by 1878 and operated by Mr. Hunter. He operated the Bighorn Mine complex and arrastras until 1893, and production during this time was around $8,000-10,000 ($300,000 in 2022).

Hunter Mine was sold in 1900, and in 1926 it was reported to be idle. Work resumed for a few years beginning in 1933. There was intermittent prospecting in the area through the 1970s, when a helicopter crashed there (see below). A 1985 report stated that the Bighorn Mine contained "fifteen underground workings, eight benches, and at least 14 prospect pits and cuts are in an area 2,000 ft wide and 6,000 ft long. The underground workings total 3,000 ft, and the benches 2,000 ft. . . . About 4,000 tons of ore containing at least 1,600 oz of gold and 9,600 oz of silver are estimated to have been mined."

There was an inexplicable "closed route" sign in a section with clearly no other route.

We checked out several mine tunnels without finding much.

This would have converted belt-driven motion to rotation about a vertical axis.

This looks like it would have spun and used centrifugal force to separate small rocks from bigger ones.

An ore cart! We found a bunch of these on the LMT.

The plaque identified this as a "KTU" engine manufactured by the Garford Motor Truck Company. Garford existed from 1909-1925.

Alas, someone stole the Garford’s hood ornament.

I found some old batteries in the dirt.

I believe this was a stamp mill shoe, which is the part of a stamp mill that crushed the rock. There was no stamp mill in the area, so I’m not sure how it got up here.

Around the corner from the mine was the Bighorn Cabin. This is perhaps the most remote and scenic cabin in the Death Valley/Inyos area.

There were many artifacts inside, including a copy of the L.A. Times from the mid-1990s and several jugs that likely contained 25-year-old water (now enriched with extra BPA!). When the LMT was established, the Sierra Club spent significant time and effort stabilizing this cabin and reestablishing the route from it down to Hunter Canyon, which had been destroyed by landslides. Their report mentions hauling jugs of water up, so these may be the jugs.

There was a great logbook and a selection of historical photos inside; Victor's digitization of them can be viewed here. Included in this album is the rather riveting story of how Wendell Moyer died of altitude sickness while descending from Ojos del Salado, a 22,615 ft (6893 m) peak in Chile. It's worth the read. He was a remarkable person. Interestingly, a couple days later, we found a 2018 entry in the McElvoy Canyon register from his grandson. Moyer's grandson, Andy "Jukebox" Metzler, reported that his parents had said the LMT was too difficult and discouraged him from hiking it. He proceeded to hike it multiple times.

Despite the stabilization efforts, the whole cabin was visibly leaning.

Irradiated evaporated milk from tuberculosis free cows? My favorite!

There was a pair of helicopter rotor blades on the ground. They were stamped with a manufacture date of 1973. I've been told that prospectors who intended to re-work the Bighorn Mine tailings in the 1970s helicoptered in supplies. Someone jumped onto the helicopter skid while it was hovering, which caused it to crash and fatally injure that person. A logbook entry from 1992 mentions helicopter wreckage, so likely the majority of the wreckage was removed sometime between then and the present.

Bighorn Cabin is so scenic.

Click for a larger view.

As we climbed, the cabin got smaller and smaller.

The cabin is still visible as a tiny speck in this photo:

Atop Survivor Ridge there was another ammo case containing a logbook. Victor's scan is here. Inexplicably there was also a pile of signs saying that four-wheelers and motorized vehicles are permitted in the area. The nearest road was many, many miles away.

On Day 2 of the LMT, we hiked from Hunter Canyon to Beveridge Canyon. This was 5.5 miles with 4400 ft of gain and 3133 ft of loss (8.8 km, +1340 m, -960 m), and we spent 9.5 hours doing this.

In the 1860s, Mexican miners explored the Inyo Mountains and likely found gold in Beveridge, but the records are sparse. According to With Infinite Toil,

John Beveridge was a local investor and politician. Also from With Infinite Toil: "Beveridge died in October, 1874. [W. L.] Hunter [the namesake of Hunter Canyon] and Beveridge had a strong partnership as well as a friendship. Beveridge appointed Hunter executor of his will, and Hunter named his son Beveridge Hunter, as well as naming the new mining district after his recently deceased friend."

The Beveridge mines operated continuously and prosperously from 1878 to 1886 and then intermittently until 1907. The total production figure was $500,000 ($15 million in 2020 dollars). The town had 40 residents in 1884 and 60 in 1885, and there was another burst of mining activity around World War I. The nearby Keynot Mine (Section 5) had intermittent operation as late as the early 1980s. Below is a tour of Beveridge, ordered roughly from west (uphill) to east (downhill).
 

Frenchy's Cabin

The first major landmark that hikers descending the canyon will encounter is Frenchy’s Cabin. Besides numerous artifacts, Frenchy’s contained food and supplies left behind from previous hikers and a logbook dating back decades. Victor partner, digitized the logbook and posted it here. He updated this album after we revisited the area in 2022.

With Infinite Toil contains the following note about Frenchy's Cabin:

There is a spring behind the cabin and it is piped a short distance for easy access. Since there aren’t animals or humans to contaminate the water between the spring and the outlet, I drank it without filtering.

Inside the cabin are a number of bunk beds and pads for them, though we did not sleep in them due to dust and Hantavirus concerns.

The Beveridge Millsite

The photo below shows Beveridge Canyon. Frenchy’s Cabin is out of view up the canyon on the middle right, and downtown Beveridge is around the corner on the left side.

Below Frenchy’s cabin, in the dry streambed was what appears to be an iron waterwheel. It was quite large--the rod was perhaps 8 feet (2.4 m) long. Wood fins would have slotted in between the two iron disks. The waterwheel was iron and therefore weighed an enormous amount--even in pieces it weighed far more than a mule could carry. My best guess is that mules carried in smaller iron pieces and the waterwheel was forged in Beveridge by the local blacksmiths.

The waterwheel illustrates how much this region has dried. This must have been a high-flowing stream to merit such a large wheel. Now there isn’t even a trickle of water. I suspect that the elimination of the Owens Lake between 1913-1926 was a primary cause of the enormous decrease in precipitation in the Inyos. Evaporation from the formerly-100-square-mile lake would have blown east and fallen as precipitation on the adjacent Inyos until the lake was sucked dry by Los Angeles.

There were wildfires burning in the Sierras when I visited Beveridge in October 2020, and the smoke created a haze in my photos. As we descended farther into the canyon, we encountered the remains of stone buildings. There are many of these, so I’ll only show photos of a few. More images are in the gallery and map.

The miners existed largely on canned foods. They threw their cans in piles which remain largely undisturbed.

In several places I found decorative cast iron. Perhaps this was from a stove.

In the streambed I found an arrastra, which was used to crush ore. This one was iron, but most of the ones I found were stone. Arrastras were introduced by the early Mexican Miners and were cheaper and easier to build than stamp mills. They involved dragging a large rock in a circle over the ore in order to crush it to the consistency of sand. Mercury, cyanide, and water could then be used to extract the gold. From With Infinite Toil:

The roof has collapsed into this cabin.

Many of the cabins contained iron blocks, as shown below. They came in various shapes and sizes. It’s been suggested that these were pestles used for grinding ore samples, counterweights for windows/doors, or stamp mill shoes. I’ve found similar iron objects in numerous cabins in the Inyos.

There were many square handmade nails.

Somehow I doubt that the wheelbarrows of today will still exist in nearly pristine condition in 130 years.

There were remnants of a wooden pipe, about a foot in diameter, that ran in the streambed throughout much of the city. Pipes used to be made by lashing together wooden planks; I've also seen this in the historical pipes used for the above-ground portions of the Kohala Ditch in Hawaii (ninth image of Section 2 here). With Infinite Toil notes that this 1.5-mile pipe was laid in summer 1885 in order to bring water to the Lasky Mill, which crushed ore from the Keynot Mine (described in the next section).

Beveridge Canyon became increasingly overgrown as we descended. I’m a bit of a bushwhack connoisseur and have spent innumerable hours fighting the vegetation during my Hawaii explorations and elsewhere, but the Beveridge plants were largely thorn bushes. They were horrible. The vague hikers’ route was elevated on the canyon walls to avoid the bushes, but we repeatedly dropped down into the bushes to check out structures. The image below shows the main part of the city, which has largely been reclaimed by the thorn bushes.

There were a number of brush clearing tools in Frenchy’s Cabin, so I carried a machete and Victor carried a pair of hedge clippers while exploring Beveridge. We made various improvements to the route, but it was still a fight against the bushes. While flailing through the thornbushes that day, my water bottle was ripped from my backpack and lost. My hiking pants were shredded. And a thorn embedded itself in my thumb deeply enough that a week passed before I managed to dig it out.

Photo of me by Victor.

I found a bunch of these bricks labeled "St. Louis Fire Brick." After some digging, I learned that the St. Louis fire bricks were worth importing all the way from Missouri because they were made of special clay that was better suited for higher temperatures than that of normal bricks, which would melt or crack. Fire bricks such as these were used at smelting and assaying sites and in the fireboxes of boilers. (Thanks for the tips, Pete Chandler and Andy.)

The Beveridge millsite had the highest density of artifacts. There was also a logbook hidden under a pot, and it can be viewed here. In a small area, there were bed frames, several cabins, an enormous 5-stamp mill and steam engine to power it, an outhouse, and a tram station. And the ground was scattered with smaller items.

Camping at the Lasky (Beveridge) Millsite.

The outhouse was literally hanging over the abyss.

Below, Victor and I are providing scale to the five-stamp mill. This was erected in 1906 by the Keynote Mining and Milling Company, and presumably replaced the Lasky Mill that had earlier operated here. This area is referred to as the "Lasky Millsite" even though the currently-existing mill is not the Lasky Mill. There was also an earlier four-stamp mill dating from 1885, which probably was just downhill from Frenchy's Cabin. On the left of the photo is the smokestack of the boiler that powered it.

The mill and steam engine boiler as viewed from the other side. The thorn bushes are reclaiming them.

The boiler:

I think this is the steam engine itself, and it would have been connected via pipes to the boiler.

This 1908 photo shows how the area looked before thornbushes conquered everything. The mill is on the left, the boiler is on the right, and the steam engine in the photo above is in the center. A belt connected the giant wheel on the mill to the (now mostly overgrown) steam engine.

Thanks to Larry Clark for forwarding this image to me. Click for a larger version.

Just past the mill was the tram station. Ore from the mountains was delivered here and then processed at the mill.

With Infinite Toil says this tramway dates to later than the 1880s Beveridge boom. The long cables that carried the ore buckets would have presented a unique transportation challenge. Wallis-Tayler described the means of transporting cable: "The transport of this rope was, owing to the rugged nature of the country to be traversed, a matter of very serious difficulty. It was accomplished by dividing the rope into ten lengths, each length made up into seven coils, with an intermediate length of 10 feet, and each of the coils in each length was loaded upon the back of a mule, the entire train being composed of seventy mules, and three men being provided to each seven mules."

I climbed down the rock to check out the ore bucket. It was quite impressive.

There were some minor structures visible in the canyon below the tramway, but we didn’t investigate them. The thorn bushes were extremely dense and we were already bloodied from earlier. On both of my trips to Beveridge, we located wild mint (it's at both the millsite and Frenchy's Cabin) and finished the day with fresh mint tea.

Interestingly, With Infinite Toil made note of what Beveridge didn't have:

Sadly, Beveridge was plundered in the mid-1970s. A guy named Bob Wolf chartered a helicopter and spent several days pillaging the most valuable artifacts from the city. He then bragged about his exploits in the January 1977 issue of Treasure Magazine. I located a copy of this issue, and the scan of the article about him can be downloaded here. The most relevant bit is below:

How much more cool stuff would remain at Beveridge if it hadn’t been looted by a helicopter-equipped team? Yikes. Now there are just a bunch of yellow signs left by the Bureau of Land Management warning that the removal of artifacts is illegal under the Antiquities Act. They were a little late.
 

Cove Spring

When hiking the Lonesome Miner Trail in 2022, Victor and I again spent a full day (our Day 3) in Beveridge. This time, we hiked up Cove Spring, the canyon extending northwest from the town site.

Looking west up Cove Spring Canyon.

The density of artifacts was much lower than in Beveridge Canyon, but nonetheless we walked past the occasional stone wall or cabin remnant.

We found a couple pickax heads and arrastras.

The day became late and we were getting increasingly tired of rock-hopping and fighting the brush. Victor paused and I scrambled up a final hill in order to see if there was anything ahead. "Victor, you’re going to want to come up here!" I yelled.

At the top of Cove Spring Canyon, there was another settlement! It had a one stamp mill, cyanide tank, ore crusher, and other heavy equipment I didn’t recognize. It was badly overgrown with thorn bushes and painful to access. The steam engine that powered them was either gone or so badly overgrown that I couldn’t find it. With Infinite Toil records that this was called the Highland Chief Mine and operated in the late 1930s.

There was evidence of a camp here, including a badly bowed and decayed picnic table. There were several nearby mine tunnels as well. I poked my head into them but none contained artifacts.

Atop the ridge northwest to Beveridge, 2700 vertical feet (830 m) above the downtown area, exists another set of mining ruins: the Keynot complex. The Keynot mine complex was the largest mining development in the Beveridge district, and it was the primary reason for the inhabitation of Beveridge Canyon. According to Death Valley to Yosemite, "The Keynot group of seven claims on the ridge north of Keynot Canyon made the record for the greatest development, including seven tunnels from 150 to 750 feet long. Its deepest mine went down 1,800 feet. Ore was carried three miles by pack mules to a five-stamp mill in Beveridge Canyon." With Infinite Toil notes that early texts refer to the mine as "Keynote," but they eventually standardized to "Keynot."

Ore was discovered in 1878 by Mexicans at what later became the Keynot Mine. In the early days, it was referred to as the "Mexican Camp." Throughout the mine's operation, the ore was carried by mules down into Beveridge or McElvoy Canyons for milling. In 1881, it was producing 15 tons of ore per day; the mule traffic to carry it down the mountain must have been significant! In the winter of 1882, nominally the mining off-season, it was producing 3 tons of ore per day and employing 30 men. The five-stamp mill still standing at the Beveridge townsite was constructed in early 1883 to crush Keynot ore, and by the end of the year it had crushed a reported 175,612 pounds of ore, yielding $19,000 ($612,000 in 2022 Dollars). In summer 1884, the Lasky mill was running 12 hours per day, processing primarily Keynot ore. It operated until around 1910, though there was intermittent work after this.

The trail from Beveridge, which once carried hundreds of pack mules per day, has badly degraded since the mining heyday. At one point during the slog up the hill, I hiked ahead of Victor for what felt like a couple minutes, and then I sat down and rested. He did not appear. I ate a snack. He did not appear. I circled back and forth on the ridge to make sure he hadn’t passed me. I started yelling, and after several attempts I heard a faint response from below. He was off-route and we couldn’t see each other. We continued screaming back and forth every few minutes so he knew which direction to go. After over an hour, Victor finally arrived. He had lost the trail and ended up dragging himself up the loose 45+ degree hill using the sagebrush as anchors.

After more slogging up the hill, we arrived at the cabin. With Infinite Toil reports that this "operated as a store, post office and/or saloon in addition to functioning as a dwelling." It had been painted and re-roofed by the Inyo Bureau of Land Management in the 1990s. The inside was reasonably clean, had tables of artifacts, and contained assorted books and documents about the area. There were a couple liters of (incredibly nasty looking) water from previous hikers, and a variety of modern tools left by the maintenance crew. We visited it the first time in the midst of the 2020 COVID pandemic, and our best discovery was a bag of 3M N95 masks left as protection against Hantavirus. Score! Those hadn’t been stocked in stores since January. I took two, and they served me well over several plane flights in the ensuing months.

Click for large image.

Yes, I carried a wireless flash this entire trip so I could balance the indoor light level with the outdoor lighting.

Some previous hikers left a, uh, "little pick me up."

Sunset and star trails over the cabin:

Victor and I hiked another half-mile (1 km) to the Keynot mine. We were running out of daylight, so we quickly explored and documented it. Below I’m checking out a trailside tunnel. It was small and didn’t go back far.

Photo by Victor.

The Keynot Mine complex contained the most modern equipment of anywhere on the Lonesome Miner Trail. It had mining activity spanning the century from the Beveridge era (late 1800s) into the early 1980s. Modern equipment is visible at the bottom of the photo below, and the older artifacts were up the hill.

I’m not too sure what this pyramidal object is. I received an email suggesting it’s a sand cone. It would have been mounted upside down, and water flowing in would have agitated the sand, enabling heavier objects to settle. If you think you know what this is, send me an email.

They just left their hammers sitting out!

The most modern mining equipment in the Inyos is found in the Keynot Mine area. A company called Far West Exploration bought the mine in 1979. They planned to rework the low-grade ore dump at the Keynot Mine, build 8.5 miles of road along the Inyo Crest and then down to the mine, and install milling equipment. In 1983, a 250-ton per day cyanide gold recovery plant was helicoptered to the site. Ore processing began, but stopped after less than a year. The equipment was abandoned and the site became quiet again.

Now, an enormous diesel generator and a bin of supplies sit at the Keystone Mine:

This enormous bulldozer was the most mystifying thing we found on the entire trip. How did it get here? There are no roads anywhere around here. A quick search suggests that comparable modern bulldozers weigh 30,000 lbs (14,000 kg). Wikipedia says that the Vietnam War-era Chinook helicopter could carry 7000 pounds to mountainous areas. At 8000-ft elevation, this certainly was that. My only guess is that they used the latest and greatest helicopters, split the bulldozer into pieces, carried it in over multiple trips, and then reassembled it locally. It certainly didn’t come in on mules.

A rock slide had partially crushed a bin containing an enormous quantity of tubes and a two-stroke pump. A report from 1991 states that the pipe previously stretched half a mile up the canyon to the spring/well, and the Sierra Club disassembled it to restore the "character" of the canyon. The spring is now dry and the entire region around the cabin is lacking in water.

Can anyone interpret the serial numbers or identify the pump model? I pulled the starter cable and the engine still turned over.

Click for zoom on product tag/serial number.

There was an argon canister used for welding. Based on the DOT codes, this cylinder was manufactured in May 1917 and last certified in January 1975. Next to the 5-17 date code is a window crosshatch. As discussed here, this originally would have been a swastika and indicates manufacture by the Von Linde Gas Company, a German corporation that was one of the first to bottle oxygen. Their use of the swastika predated the Nazi party, and after World War II, the swastikas on the American bottles were converted into window shapes.

The hopper and control panel of the ore sorting conveyor belt:

I was highly entertained that the conveyor belt was powered by an automotive drivetrain. There was a car engine, transmission, and driveshaft powering the conveyor.

Based on a tip (thanks, Eric Maruniak!) and some Internet sleuthing, I think this engine is a 1970s-era Toyota R engine, likely the 18R. This is a 2.0L 4-cylinder used in various cars including the Corona.

The moon rose through the wildfire smoke over Saline Valley as Victor and I left the mine and returned to the Ridge Cabin for the night.

When Victor and I returned a couple years later during our hike of the Lonesome Miner Trail, we diverted here in order to investigate the Keynot Well. As we trudged up the snowy streambed, we passed a number of barrels that had input pipes at the top and output pipes at the bottom. My guess is that these would have filled with water and acted as tanks in order to provide a steadier flow to the mine workings.

After significant wanderings and nearly giving up, I located the "well." It was about a 15 ft deep by 2 ft wide by 8 ft long (4 x 0.6 x 2.5 m) hole in the ground. There was a ladder but no water in it. Based upon my conversations with Tim Waag, this was a water catchment hole and not a true well. Basically, after a wet winter, water would flow downhill and collect into the hole. However, I’m still a bit confused because this would have only contained 1500 gallons of water or so, which is nowhere near enough to supply the needs of the Keynot mining complex below unless it was continually replenished.

I liked these tin (?) water tanks with wooden stoppers. These would have been hung off the sides of mules and used to transport water to the remote cabins.

Adjacent to the well and water tanks was a rock engraved with W.G., J.C., L.C., and F.E.B., though I’m not sure of that last letter. If you know who any of these people are, please email me.

Victor and I returned to Keynot Mine and then made a fairly miserable scramble up the loose scree to the upper part of the complex. There were a number of remains of tin and rock cabins.

The ore cart was patented July 1908!

Cabins were spread over an extended area. Here are some of the older-seeming cabins we passed on our LMT journey to McElvoy Canyon.

During Wendell Moyer’s explorations of the Inyo Mountains in the 1980s, he stumbled upon a particularly mysterious construction where McElvoy Canyon met the Saline Valley. As with most of the canyons in the area, McElvoy contained a number of waterfalls. However, someone had constructed ladders from baling wire and 1.5" wooden rods adjacent to the waterfalls. The tallest of the ladders was 150 feet. Not trusting the ladders, Moyer organized a climbing expedition, and they rigged their own ropes and ascended the canyon. They discovered a well-constructed cabin above the waterfalls. It was furnished with a stove, bed, and food. It also contained beekeeping supplies and Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets. A mile up the canyon were older abandoned miner cabins, and in the adjacent mine they found another stash of food, copies of The Watchtower, and beekeeping equipment. During other trips, Moyer learned of three more cabins of similar construction in the Inyos between the Owens Valley and the reached the Saline Valley. The four cabins were roughly in a line.

But how did it all get there? Who built the cabins, and would he come back for them? After inquiring with local old-timers, Moyer learned that the "Beekeeper of the Inyos" was Marion Howard. In 1994, Moyer located Howard, who was nearly 84 years old and living out of a home-built camper on a truck in the Owens Valley. Below is an abbreviated summary of what Moyer learned about Howard; the full version can be read here (and I’ve archived it here in case that site disappears from the Internet before this one).

Naturally, I wanted to see what remained from the Beekeeper. While training for the Lonesome Miner Trail, I paid a visit to his cabin on the Owens Valley side of the Inyos. The road to the trailhead was washed out, loose, and overgrown; I was glad to have a Rubicon, and I started walking once the road simply ceased to exist. The road clearly used to go farther. The 3 mile, 2600 ft gain (4.8 km, 800 m) trail was similarly washed out and tricky to follow in places.

The trail at the left of the photo terminated in this wash. After a few more good rainstorms, it won’t be possible to get even this far anymore.

The logbook in this cabin dated back 20 years and had only a dozen entries. I was the first person to visit in four years. I photographed the pages, and they can be viewed here.

Thoreau’s Walden and the Bible: two essential reads for a cabin in the woods?

The remains of the second canyon are just south of the summit of Mt. Inyo. I did the (quite brutal) dayhike of Mt. Inyo in September 2023 and found the ruins in the cleft of a large rock. Not much remains of the cabin: there is a stove, shovel, ax, chopped wood, crushed food cans, and a commemorative plaque.

When I crossed McElvoy Canyon while hiking the LMT, I found a logbook entry from Steve Smith, accompanied by Wendell Moyer, reporting that he placed plaques on each of the four Beekeeper’s cabins. Only the plaques on the Owens Valley-facing cabin and the Mt. Inyo summit cabin survive. The others seem to have been stolen. C’mon, people!

The plaque on the cabin closest to the Owens Valley.

Next, when I was in McElvoy Canyon while hiking the Lonesome Miner Trail, I paid a visit to the third Beekeeper’s cabin. Victor and I woke up before dawn, packed up our backpacks in the 25 F (-7 C) darkness, and then hiked a mile down the canyon. We had to push through the bushes, crossed the semi-frozen stream a dozen times in each direction, and repeatedly slipped on icy rocks, but eventually we turned a corner and found the cabin.

Ice, everywhere.

Unlike how Wendell Moyer described the cabin in his mid-1990s article, there were no longer any artifacts inside it. Victor explored a nearby cave and found it devoid of artifacts too. There were a few nearby small rock piles, but apart from some discarded cans, the relics from the Beekeeper were gone.

Finally, shortly after starting the climb north out of McElvoy Canyon, we found the mine tunnel containing the best artifacts of Howard, just as described by Moyer.

The 1974 Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet.

The beekeeper’s helmet.

The smoker that Howard presumably used to evict the bees from the hives while he harvested honey.

Two honey jars and a couple frames with beeswax still on them.

The beekeeper’s net and other artifacts.

It seems Howard kept a collection of boots in each of his cabins.

Finally, as I drove into the Saline Valley to start the Lonesome Miner Trail, I paid a visit to the Beekeeper’s cabin there. It was also up a 4wd road away from Saline Valley Road, and there was a half-mile hike. There was no sign of nearby water (or the trees used in its construction!) though.

It was mostly devoid of artifacts. The exception to this was the stash of shoes it seems Marion Howard kept in each of his cabins.

This traverse of loose, side-sloped, snowy scree was pretty representative of the LMT...

After we departed the Bighorn Mine area, we walked quickly toward McElvoy Canyon. Shortly before we started downhill toward the canyon, we rounded a corner and saw mysterious boot prints in the snow. The footprints were southbound on the LMT (the opposite direction from us), and we hadn’t seen anyone earlier. The snow had fallen about a week earlier, so the prints were fresh. We were baffled that someone had hiked a couple days south, all the way out of McElvoy Canyon, and then... vanished. There aren’t other trails in the area. All the logbooks we encountered had no record of anyone else recently. There wasn’t a second set of prints returning north, so the party didn’t turn around. The only theory I can come up with is that they hooked a left, departed the trail, and followed a ridge down to the Saline Valley.

The view into the Saline Valley toward South Pass.

This section was the toughest part of the LMT. There was significant snow and several sketchy scree and talus crossings. The drop into McElvoy Canyon was 3200 vertical feet (1000 m), the trail was in very poor condition for a lot of this, and it was nonexistent at the end. We obtained our first view into McElvoy well after sunset. Shortly after this, we put on our headlamps and rock scrambled for another couple hours.

A rockslide destroyed the trail for the last few hundred vertical feet into McElvoy. As a result, we basically jumped from boulder to snow-covered boulder in the dark, slipping frequently. Both of us had wet feet³ from the snowmelt. We both fell and slid down the final 10 vertical feet into the stream at the base of McElvoy because we couldn’t find a proper route in the dark. After this we had to bushwhack. The final 200 linear feet to the campsite took us half an hour, I think. Exhausted, hungry, and covered in dirt, twigs, and scrapes, we staggered into a large cabin in the dark and set up camp.

On Day 4 of the LMT, we hiked from the Beveridge millsite to McElvoy Canyon, with a diversion to the Keynot well. We covered 8.5 miles, gained 5300 ft, and lost 5500 ft (13.3 km, +1610 m, -1690 m) over 11 hours and 20 minutes.

The biggest flat area was literally inside this cabin, so we camped here.

We set up our camp in the dark and took it down before dawn the following morning, so I don’t have photos of our tents inside the cabin.

There were piles of artifacts here. So much cool stuff!

Yet another mill shoe? B for Beveridge?

There were a number of small stone cabins around and also a significant stone foundation. Judging from the logbook entries, there used to be a huge steam engine and another stamp mill here. With Infinite Toil says this was a five-stamp mill (as big as the one presently in Beveridge!) and helped to process the prodigious quantities of ore coming from the Keynot Mine. However, it seems this machinery been buried by a flash flood sometime since the 1990s. Bits of metal suggestive of large machinery poked from the sand in places. A big work party with metal detectors and willingness to dig and re-place machinery could restore the canyon’s artifacts to their previous impressive state. In Bighorn Cabin, Victor found this photo, taken in 1995 by Wendell Moyer, showing the steam engine and stonework that used to be visible in McElvoy Canyon:

and here's roughly the same angle in 2022:

Some half-buried remnants sticking out of the dirt:

Beginning the climb out of McElvoy Canyon.

After exiting the canyon, we passed by a bunch of mine tunnels, including the one that housed the Beekeeper’s belongings (discussed in the previous section). We checked out a few tunnels but then were running so behind schedule that we walked past the next several.

There were lots of pretty rocks outside the mines.

We rounded a corner and, for a few seconds, had a view of a herd of bighorn sheep. They scampered off the trail before I could mount my telephoto lens. I dropped my pack and ran to an overlook, but they were nowhere to be found. They must have descended a few hundred feet and disappeared in less than a minute.

Footnotes:
²Observation: Gore-Tex keeps water out of boots... until it keeps water in the boots. Victor had lightweight hiking shoes that got wet each evening as we hiked through the snow on the north-facing slopes, but they dried out in the morning. On the contrary, my Gore-Tex boots stayed dry for the first half of the trip and wet for the second half of the trip. Putting on crunchy frozen boots in the morning is the best! Return.

Apart from the mines we passed on the first half hour of hiking out of McElvoy Canyon, we saw few artifacts along the hike to Pat Keyes Canyon. The only items of note we saw were a stone cabin foundation and a wash basin that had been skewered on a tree branch.

With Infinite Toil notes that Pat Keyes discovered gold in the area in 1887, and the area became extremely productive in the mid-1890s. Pat Keyes Mine was located on the ridge north of Pat Keyes Canyon. For example, in a single week in December 1895, he collected 113 ounces of gold, and this rate of gold production was not unusual for his mine. He processed his ore in two arrastras on the canyon floor (one of which we camped next to) and also at the mills in McElvoy and Beveridge Canyons. One of these canyon floor arrastras was steam-powered, and the other was burro-powered. The operation in Pat Keyes Canyon and Mine was smaller than in Beveridge; Keyes employed only about five men in 1896.

Pat Keyes was the highest, coldest, and snowiest of the canyons in which we camped. We lost the trail on the final descent into the canyon and had to bushwhack through thorn bushes. Pat Keyes seemed much smaller and more overgrown than the other canyons. We arrived just at sunset, and there were no clear campsites. We dropped our backpacks in a central area, rapidly added layers (the temperature was already below 30 F [-1 C] and dropping quickly), and split up in search of a flat area for camping as it became increasingly dark. After 10 minutes, we settled on semi-cleared spot adjacent to an arrastra. We removed some branches and then spent 20 minutes piling up beds of pine needles to flatten our spots and insulate us from the frozen ground. After much complaining about the temperature, both of us put on literally all of our clothes and then went to bed.

On Day 5 of the LMT, we hiked down McElvoy Canyon to the Beekeeper Cabin, returned, and then went to Pat Keyes Canyon. We gained 5000 ft and lost 3340 ft over 8.5 miles (+1520 m, -1020 m, 14 km) and 10.5 hours.

My pine needle tent foundation.

We were rather surprised and relieved to wake up in the morning without experiencing life-threatening cold during the night. A week of sleeping in sub-freezing temperatures had trained our bodies to keep the core temperatures higher, and the WEAR ALL THE CLOTHES and pine needle bed strategies helped too. The isobutene stove was quite weak in the morning, though.

As I tried to pour water into my bottle, the super-chilled water formed an upside-down icicle upward from the neck of my bottle. The stream in Pat Keyes was running, but it was just a trickle of a few gallons per minute. It was the weakest of the streams in the canyons, and I would not be shocked if it dried up a decade or two in the future.

Entertainingly, in February 1885 Pat Keyes had a cold-weather experience worse than ours: "Pat Keyes had hard luck over in Beveridge during the snow storm; his pack animals were caught by the storm in the mountains, and all perished of cold and hunger. Pat came up from Darwin last Sunday and bears no trace of suffering in his own person, he is as good looking as ever."

We wandered around Pat Keyes Canyon in the morning, but most of the artifacts were buried under the snow. We couldn’t locate the logbook.

The remains of a stone cabin.

Pat Keyes Canyon felt much smaller than the other canyons, and the artifacts it contained seemed less impressive than those of the other canyons. This 1975 trip report describes a steam engine, gasoline engine, and then-ongoing cyanide operation, but we saw no traces of any of these.

There was another cabin foundation atop the ridge above Pat Keyes. There was no water near this, so it must have been supplied by mule trains.

I can’t quite identify/read this chewing tobacco tin. But the Iron Cross, which was the symbol of the Kingdom of Prussia and Nazi Germany, is clear. Some Googling didn’t turn up anything about this. If you know about a chewing tobacco company with Iron Cross iconography, send me an email.

Victor and I detoured down the ridge from the cabin to check out the Pat Keyes Mine. After the initial development in the 1880s-1890s, the mine was worked again in the 1930s, and some of the tailings were reworked in the 1970s. A 1992 trip report noted the presence of an 1892-patented 6-horsepower gasoline engine, which Pat Keyes installed in 1897 to power two more arrastras. The party in 1975 found quite a bit more here. Unfortunately, it seems that since then the artifacts have walked away or been buried by mine collapses. Apart from a pickax head, piles of tailings, and a few holes in the ground, we didn’t find much. We didn't find the gasoline engine or arrastras near the mine. This diversion off the LMT was rather disappointing.

We pushed onward and upward, finally crossing the 9500 ft (2900 m) crest of the Inyos. We obtained our first view of the Sierras, and then it was all downward!

We passed the remains of yet another stone cabin at the 7550 ft (2300 m) level.

A couple months earlier, I put in a water cache at the 7100 ft (2150 m) level, which was midway up the mountain. Victor and I retrieved the water and were prepared to camp here, but we were cold and elected to push onward to real beds. So we cooked our Patagonia Provisions Spicy Chili (highly recommended!) and watched the sunset over the Owens Valley.

Looking north in the Owens Valley.

Sunset behind the Sierra Crest.

Mt. Whitney and Lone Pine shortly after sunset.

We hiked the final two hours to the trailhead near Reward Mine in the dark, and then drove to Lone Pine for incredibly appreciated warm beds and a not-a-protein-bar breakfast. With this, the Lonesome Miner Trail was finished. On this final day, we climbed 3300 ft and descended 6400 ft over 10 miles (+1010 m, -1960 m, 16 km) in 10 hours.

Above Keynot Mine

There are extensive ruins between Keynot Mine and Keynot Peak. It’s an extremely remote, dry, and steep area, even by the standards of the Inyos, so the fact that development occurred in this region is particularly impressive. During our 2020 hike, Victor and I hiked from the Keynot Mine Ridge Cabin upward to Keynot Peak, and then we traversed the Inyo Crest south to New York Butte.

There were many expressions of fatigue as Victor and I trudged up the mountainside, eventually exceeding 11,000 ft (3380 m).

We found another arrastra.

Nearby was the mantle of a cabin.

Cast iron, perhaps from a stove?

The remains of a floral-patterned China plate:

Far above the Ridge Cabin and the arrastra, almost to the top of Keynot Peak, we found another development. A number of people on the Internet call this structure a sawmill. However, I can’t find any historical references to this, and the trees in the area are small and gnarled, and therefore would make poor lumber. Also, this spot was really, really far from water. I'm really rather baffled by its existence.

Tools abandoned at the sawmill:

The machinery of the sawmill:

The Saline Salt Tram:

Saline Valley, the valley separated from Owens Valley by the Inyo Mountains, was known to have exceptionally pure salt deposits as early as 1864. Transportation from there to the Owens Valley by wagon was a two-day journey, so a 13.5-mile salt tram was constructed between the valleys in 1911-1912. 1 million board feet of lumber and 600 tons of iron had to be dragged into the mountains, which financially exhausted the Saline Valley Salt Company. The tramway operated in 1913-1918, 1920-1921, and 1929-1936. The tramway proved uneconomical, bankrupted four different companies, and finally shut down permanently. Due to the remote area, most of the tram towers remain. I have visited the summit station, which has an adjacent cabin for workers, and the Saline Valley terminus.

Looking toward Saline Valley and the next tram tower:

The end of the line in Saline Valley:

The elevation profile of the salt tram:

A narrow gauge railroad serviced the Owens Valley side of the salt tram. These historical images were sourced from here and here, and there are far more images where these came from.

Workers rode the buckets to their assignments.

The salt:

My photos of the summit station at night:

Click to view a larger version.

Click to view a larger version.
 

Burgess Mine

The Burgess Mine is located atop the Inyos near New York Butte. It operated in the early 20th Century. Death Valley to Yosemite records the following:

Where the Inyos Meet the Saline Valley

The base of the mountains in Saline Valley has myriad mining camps. There are too many to discuss here. Below are a few photos of the settlement at the base of Beveridge Canyon.

Notes on Hiking and Water

I have intentionally been vague about the routes to access the areas discussed here. I aim to document the history of the area and encourage its preservation, not drive ruinous traffic to it. Internet attention, particularly on Instagram, has led to the destruction of innumerable beautiful and historic locations. Beveridge already was looted once (discussed at the end of Section 4)—let’s avoid that happening again.

If you hike in the area and bring back an artifact, it might look cool on your wall for a few years or a decade, and then it will end up in a closet without historical context and ultimately will go to the trash. On the other hand, a piece of history on the LMT has already survived a century out there, so it's not in imminent peril and in need of "rescue." It and the stuff around it provide a story of the mining history of the area. Away from that context, it's just a piece of iron or glass. So please, if you hike into the Inyos, do not take or alter the stuff you find. The Leave No Trace principles are worth a read. With that said, the Lonesome Miner Trail is in poor condition and would benefit from additional boots to define it.

The biggest challenge to exploring the area is the lack of water. Below are the water sources I’m aware of, ordered from south to north. Use at your own risk; please verify them with someone else before committing your life to their continued existence. When I hiked the LMT in 2022, I carried a water filter but never used it. Human and animal traffic are low enough that it's safe to drink the water straight.

Photo Galleries

Below is a table containing the scans of each of the logbooks Victor and I found in the Inyos.

My album of Beveridge photos can be viewed here. Google stopped giving free storage, so my LMT photos are solely here on sgphotos.
 

Timeline

Below is a timeline showing the dates of operation of a number of mines in the Beveridge district. It was reproduced from With Infinite Toil (linked below).

Further reading

With Infinite Toil: Historical Archaeology in the Beveridge Mining District, Inyo County, California is the authoritative history of the Beveridge region. It is the 1993 PhD dissertation of Karen Swope. It can be downloaded here, and its index is here.

Death Valley to Yosemite: Frontier Mining Camps & Ghost Towns by L Burr Belden & Mary DeDecker provides an excellent overview of many of the ghost towns in the region.

The 1977 issue of Treasure Magazine, which records the helicopter-assisted pillaging of Beveridge, can be downloaded here.
 

Contact me

Questions or comments? Incoherent rage-mail? Email me at sean@sgphotos.com.