Continuing south and east, we popped into the Inyo National Forest to check out Harkless Flat. I can’t recommend the road in for RV people. In fact, please don’t try it. There’s no cell service (until you reach the end of the road) so you can’t call for help when you get stuck or tear the bottom out of your rig. I would never bring my MH in here, and I brought my MH all sorts of places I had no business going, which is why it is such a dilapidated mess. This is pickup country. Even I touched bottom three times on the way to this campsite, which was a fabulous one. I bottomed out because of my blankety-blank trike rack, which is way too low to the ground. I will have to get the welding shop to rebuild the rack to reduce these problems which are seriously cramping my style. Very irksome.

View from our campsite. We’re looking across the Owens Valley toward the eastern Sierra. The body of water is the intake for the LA city water supply. You may be aware that LA pretty much owns the entire Owens River, and in fact, consumes the entire Owens River. There isn’t much Owens River left once you get south of Owens Lake because LA drinks it all.

Walking down (and I do mean DOWN) from our campsite, you encounter this mine, which I think, by consulting the Forest Service map, is probably the Blake mine. I have no clue what Mr. Blake might have been mining here…could have been gold, but there are other possibilities as well. There was a ruined cabin a few hundred feet from our campsite, and then this mine about half a mile away. How Mr. Blake got his ore from this mine up to the “road” is a total mystery. That is the way it is with these old mines…the miners were obviously much hardier and WAY more determined than modern people. It was hard to get myself to this mine and back, much less a ton of rocks. This weird wheelbarrow-cum-ore-cart wouldn’t have fit on the path, even if it didn’t weigh a hundred pounds (empty). Note that the path is visible in this photo. You are looking at the path. So that’s how great a path it is. It seems more likely that Mr. Blake used his ore cart (before most of its wheels went missing) to haul ore out of the mine. Maybe he had a hapless animal of some kind to actually get the ore to the “road”, and a team of hapless animals to get the ore down the “road” to the REAL road several miles away. The mine had to have been a more-or-less successful concern because there was a cabin. Lots of mines didn’t even get that far.