Continuing where I left off yesterday, https://hive.blog/hive-163772/@rt395/the-ancient-bristle-cone-pines-forest-p-1-the-schulman-grove
The Mexican Mine is an old lead & zinc mine that dates back to 1863. It's located in the Methuselah Grove, West of the Visitor's Center parking lot.
Starting out, the walk to the Mexican mine takes you past several picturesque bristlecone pines as well as limber pines. After a small switchback the path is fairly straight and level.
An old, dead tree with it's roots exposed.
A look back towards the parking lot and the road to the Patriarch Grove. This tree is pretty awesome and we'll return to it later.
The Mexican mine consists of two sites, an upper and lower workings. The lower workings are 1/2 mile from the visitor's center and offer the most bang for the tourist buck with log cabins, mine tailings and a descriptive plaque.
The interior of the first cabin.
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A plaque describing the history of the mine.
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This is the second cabin.
For reference the logs they used were about 12 - 18" in diameter. Not only huge, but heavy. An impressive pair of cabins.
Harken back to the days before mass communication. When it was just you & the elements. Sitting in one of these cabins with your fellow miners, telling tall tales of slaying a bear, catching that 20lb fish or finding the long lost gold mine when you were drunk!
Sometimes it seems those days might have been preferable to our current, chaotic era. Nothing but stars, big skies and nature.
The actual haulage adit for the mine has collapsed, or the Forestry service collapsed it. Either way, some timbering still stands to mark what once was.
As noted on the plaque, the haulage adit stretched 400' back into the mountain, which would take us to the upper workings.
I actually had to take a rest on that bench. My heart was pounding due to the incline and altitude.
The hike to the upper workings is another 1/2 mile.
There were quite a bit of tailings up here so I imagine this was the original mine. This is where they found the vein of zinc & lead and started burrowing into the mountain.
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One of the veins was still exposed and it seems people had been digging here not too long ago. Perhaps university students studying geology?
While up at the upper workings I spotted this interesting tree.
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It appears to be a single tree that had two growths with one portion dying while the other thrived. An odd specimen to say the least.
Making our way back down the trail, I stopped off at the beautiful tree we passed on the way in.
An ancient, standing along for possibly millennia, yet still dutifully producing green.
That's it for this post. The finale post in this series will be about the Patriarch Grove 12 miles away, with the largest bristlecone pine tree known, the Patriarch. Here's a sneak peak.
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For information on the Bristlecone Pine Forest you can visit https://www.bishopvisitor.com/activities/bristlecone-forest/
Thanks for reading!
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