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September
2001 In 1972, I was
near the end of my backpacking experience.�
I had gotten involved with it at a late age, being 36 years old
when I first started. That made me 39 when I made this trip. It was
to be a loop trip starting at Pine Creek, North and West of Bishop,
California in the Eastern High Sierra. It w Late snows limited us to Lake Italy and return, as the passes we needed were still closed.� But this gave us two chances to view the famous Stratcor/U.S.Tungsten mine�s mill viewed from our trail on the North flank of Mt. Tom, as well as the Brownstone Mine above us on the trail. Backpacking is
a whole different way to explore versus our usual dual purpose m First, of course, you are carrying your �base Camp� with you.� Where you stop can be camp for the day or a lunch stop.� Second is the matter of weight.� My hiking partner and Guru, Warren, made the trip with me.� His backpack weighed but 35-40 pounds.� Mine, carrying� both a Pentax Single Lens Reflex 35mm camera and a Stereo-Realist stereoscopic 35mm camera each weighing 2 � pounds, plus film for each,� food for my lunches and snacks came to 55 pounds weighed with a spring-hook scale at the trail head.� By comparison, I am also a larger person over-all, and my own gear is thus heavier to begin with.� We split breakfast and supper and special stove fuel, but were on our own for lunch. Also,� we trained for the backpack as travelling cross-country
requires different muscles and at times ba August 1972, after a long drive from Los Angeles, we arrived. As we made our way slowly up the steep, dusty, tree-root crossed trail, we met a large party coming down.� They were quite impressed that we were climbing up the �down� route!� And now to the pictures.� The first two were taken from the trail we were going up (a horse-packing route).� The remaining four pictures of the Brownstone mine were taken on our return from Lake Italy and we were but a few miles and hours from my truck way below. At the time Warren
and I travelled by the Pine Creek tungsten mine on our way to a much
further destination, I� knew
very little about this mine and it�s elaborate mill.�
In fact I was quite surprised to see the mill buildings and our
trail, for a ways along the flanks of Mt. Tom, did not The Brownstone Mine also fed this mill.� The steep sides of the Eastern high Sierras, makes mining operations in the Bishop Tungsten District challenging, to say the very least; especially in the earlier days of developing the mines. The block of the earth that makes up the Sierras is tilted West and partially raised, sloping it�s top surface from the rugged Eastern edge to the gentle agricultural plains in West Central California.� This accounts for the meteorological and erosional phenomena we see, and makes living and working in this range of mountains a real task. The In fact, there was a major earthquake at the head of Pine Creek Canyon, October 4th 1978, where the Brownstone Mine (in my pictures) is located.� Fortunately, a crew of drillers preparing test holes were inside the Brownstone at the time, safe from the cascading rocks and boulders falling off the cliff walls.� Equipment outside the mine was heavily damaged, as you can imagine. Back in 1972,
when we were returning from our �Sierra Safari�, we passed the a Warren and I took some last pictures,� turned a corner of the trail, and headed down to the horse packing station where we had left my truck.� There, we cleaned ourselves up, a change of clothes, snacks, and headed back to Los Angeles, the noise, and the smog.� Jerome W. Anderson |
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