hey guys my name is Brent and I am headed deep into this mountain range you see behind me in search of a lost mining trail that used to connect some legendary mines back in the [Music] 1800s these mines are long gone but a few ghost towns remain and that's where I am headed this is Pat Keys's Mill this hike is very remote it's going to be a brutal hike a lot of the trail has just been long to rock slides in your mountains keep delivering we are going to be staying in cabins left behind in the 1800s look at what we have camping outside otherwise and just trying to understand all the history that happened up here so [Music] cool I just can't believe that this is here I think my hope with this whole hike is just to understand some of these towns that I read about in history books there's casual mentions of you know keot mine of Big Horn mine of Beverage of Pat Key's mine and all these mines back in the day were very important in their own way but they've kind of been lost to history and one of my favorite things to do on this channel and otherwise is to understand this past history and kind of Bring It Back to Life a little bit and so my hope is by going up into here seeing them with my own eyes I can bring them back to life a little bit and help piece together the historic puzzle that is the Ino mountain range and that is just mining in Ino [Music] County the trail I'm on is called The Lonesome miners Trail it's a collection of prospect routes from the 1800s that Meander through some of the most rugged and remote portions of the Ino mountains the trail is about 50 Mi long and drops in and out of five Canyons resulting in almost 25,000 ft of elevation gain and 25,000 ft of elevation lost throughout the hike in those five Canyons there's four different mining towns all preserved time the places varied in size from a couple dozen people to over 100 residents but they all tell a story a story that directly connects to S Gordo the old mining town I live in this area was Infamous for two reasons first how difficult the terrain is a researcher in the' 60s described the hike is wild rugged dry country accessible only by foot then as now a challenge to men's Ingenuity and stamina and back in the 1800s a newspaper described the trail as so nearly vertical in most places as to be inaccessible to anything without wings there are reports of dead miners being found along the trail of winter trips that almost killed the mine owners but still the miners kept going back because the gold ore was so rich in total the miners pulled almost 38,000 ounces of gold out of the region which is equivalent to almost $100 million in today's dollars but these days the trail the encampments upon it are seldom talked about it's mostly forgotten to time Vlog books on the hike showed it had been years since anyone had been to some of the stops along the way so I'm excited to shine a bit more light on the area and to see what history we can uncover so this hike is hard and this first day is especially hard I'm at about 3700 ft in elevation right now now where I'm going to try to get to by tonight is 9700 ft so 6,000 ft in elevation above here and I know it's hard cuz I actually tried this hike about 5 months ago and I did this first day I got up above 9,700 ft and my backpack broke and so I cashed my backpack with my sleeping bag my water filter and more way up there and My Hope kind of the Crux of this whole hike that those items are still there if I don't have my sleeping bag if I don't have my water filter then I am screwed the second big issue with this hike is water obviously I can't hike in enough water for four or five days this is going to be going over towards saling Valley which is Death Valley I'm going to be drinking a lot of water so I need rely in these Springs and because very few people do this hike every year there's not very good information about the status of these Springs and so I really really really need to find these Springs which I don't know exactly where they are and I need those Springs to have water I'm up near 6,000 ft now so we're climbing pretty steadily I just love the view of clouds racing across the the valley I guess not clouds I like the Shadows of the clouds racing across the valley so I do like the clouds or do I like the Shadows good thing I got a long hike ahead of me to think about questions like that this is the Sierra Nevada in front of me there's a lot of stories in these Hills um both on the Sierra side and over here on the East which is the Ino mountains and so on this side it is much less wooded there's a lot less moisture over over here um there's a lot more mining on this side of the canyon and a lot more secrets [Music] too all right I'm at about 7,000 ft in elevation now and it's lunchtime I am a little concerned about the speed of which I'm going it has just been a slog up these Hills so far packs feeling pretty heavy I got a lot more to do not just today but in the coming days my main concern right now is just the water I'm going through a little bit faster than I want to and again I don't know the status of these Springs I do want to get to beverage that should be by day 2 or 3 into the hike and so my pace is what's considered is kind of concerning me the most right now um these are all things that hopefully I can make up by tonight if I can get to the place where I put my pack by tonight I'll be feeling pretty good right now it's feeling very exposed out here and I'm feeling very slow in my time but that appeal of the unknown is overriding any sense of tiredness you know that desire to see these places I've only read about these uh pieces of history that I think just allow me to appreciate my life up here even more all right I'm closing on 8,000 ft in elevation and the trail is getting a little bit harder to find mind but I just saw this which is a stack of rocks also known as a Karen so Karen is a stop stack of rocks that other hikers have left to indicate hey this is the trail and I know that Karen's can be very controversial some are very much hey leave no Trace don't put those up those aren't natural you're taking away from the experience people that want to feel like they nature others are like hey it helps find the trail and I'm little split but generally there's something a little comforting if you see a small Carin along the [Music] way all right I am up over 9,000 ft in elevation now I have come up about 5,400 ft in elevation I have about oh 6 or 700t of elevation gain to go until I get to the pass so till I get to the crest of this side of the Ino mountains and so in this hike what I'm hoping to do is get to the crest then over the course of a few days I'm going to drop in and out of three or four different canyons and in each of these Canyons there's a mine there's a mining town even in some of them and so the reason that those are there is a lot of times when they're looking for this ore what they would do is they would walk up a canyon looking for float which is basically just ore that's laying right there in the canyon and if it was Galina silver and lead it'd be heavier than the others if it was gold it'd be very obvious so they would walk up Canyon until they didn't find anymore then they would figure oh it must be to the left oh it must be to the right and so that's why a lot of these places these mining camps will be found in the canyons themselves that's the hope you know these camps again haven't been visited very much in a very long time and so I don't know the state of them and so we're going to get a firsthand look at what's still there there it is saline Valley which is part of Death Valley National Park probably nobody that way for many many many miles we're going to hug this Ridge and start dropping down a little bit this is just stunning so now the next step in this process is to find my stuff I can't see anybody coming over here to get it but I mean this is if this isn't here and this is the end of my hike once again yeah this is the rock I thought about putting it [Applause] in and somewhere lower I ended up throwing it in a tree boom there we are baby yes this is so sick yes and there it is right where I left it about five or 6 months ago this is Big my voice cracked I'm so excited oh man this is so heavy oh man now I got to this to it jeez Brent but we got it we got it baby yes the hike can continue I am stoked yes this is awesome this is going to make the whole thing possible right here so it's time to do an unboxing I can't really remember what I have I know we have a sleeping bag but what what else is in the store let's hope for some food and a water filter all right we have the jet boil a jacket a tripod a sleeping bag and a waterproof bag an air pillow an air pad yeah boy and some ginger fried rice with beef dinner is served I'm curious you guys in the know what is the best trail food like this this one is a uh Aline air I also have some traditional ones in there too but I'm curious what you guys think is their favorite this one's pretty good what's the best that's what I want to know all right let's talk history and this patch of land that I'm sitting on right now the reason that I'm starting off my hike over here the reason that all this is here is a man named Pat Keys Pat Keys was a man that in 1887 established a little mine around here he established a gold mine a very productive Gold Mine there is a report that an 1895 he produced 113 o of gold in a single week which is hundreds of thousands of dollars if you adjust it for today's inflation and his mine was just over there very close it's mostly collapsed but where he processed The Ore was down in the canyon where we're going to go tomorrow but in the 1890s he was employing about Five Guys here it was a really big deal and it kind of put this area on the map even more you know beverage was humming at that point um the Keen which two mines that we're going to continue going to or humming but we're going to go down there tomorrow and kind of see what his life was like you know we're going to take the same trail that he would have taken from his mine up here all the way down to his processing plant and hopefully um very hopefully there is a spring there uh he used the spring to process his ore and so that is where I need to get water I have about maybe a gallon left and the hope is to continue hitting some of these Springs but that's the big big unknown um if I don't have water I might have to turn back but let's figure that out tomorrow right now it's getting kind of late so I'm going to kind of get ready for bed Journal a little bit which I always love doing and uh get ready to see Pat Key's whole operation tomorrow [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and here is one of Pat Key's cabins we're over by where his mine is now and this is where he was spending his days you you can tell that he cribed up a lot of the rock cuz bringing materials in here would have been hard as you saw the hike in was no joke yesterday and even with mules it's incredible to think that this is how he would have lived there's still some remnants of him there's this canteen there a blasting caps tin go peek it into his mine and Hike back up and go down to refine The Ore as well as hopefully find a spring you see this this is the uh California cap company trip [Music] XX not a bad view for Pat in the morning these days you look on the ground what remains of his life is a bunch of tins some piping I wonder when Pat woke up in the morning what he was dreaming about or if he thought that hundred and 30 years later some guy'd be digging around in his trash on the road again and today it's to start getting a little interesting the path is going to be much less toin each day the path is going to be harder to find but each day we're going to to a bigger and bigger mining camp including ones that had hundreds of residents and all sorts of stuff left behind right now I am needing to go down this Valley you see in front of me and I ideally find a spring as well as the millsite of Pat [Music] keys so you can see below me the valley we're headed and you can see along the bottom of the canyon the bright green trees which must be where the water is and I believe that the water's up that Canyon a little bit and it is steep and all I keep thinking about when I'm looking at it is we have to go down there but then we have to climb back up this whole Peak and then drop back down to the next Valley I'm getting closer to the canyon floor and I think there's something about human nature where we can just sense water I don't know the exact word for it but I could feel it I can hear it now and my body is just a little more at ease it's something that humans just love about looking at or being around water woo we got ourselves our first sign of humans oil oh oh Pat Keys down here somewhere I see some wood we see some signs of humans and look what we have oh Old Camp for old pat down here by the mill that's awesome there's a lot of remnants from the past here like this I don't know what it is but that's for some type of Mill getting myself down here is one thing imagine getting all these pickaxes they had to have down here we got little knife a ladle fireplace pan I don't even know what's in there I don't want to open it it's so peaceful here old saw books little pans little Trail down to the spring look at that a running water way out here little old desert that is awesome water I found it this is key it's so cool to think that each of these Canyons a mile or two from Death Valley National Park has these flowing streams in them it's just like this hidden surprise that you come upon and brightens your mood this is down kind of near his campsite I think I think the mill is further Upstream than this so I got some water just in case but ideally I'd like to get some water closer to the spring we're a little bit Downstream right now so we're going to wander up there try to find these Aras and here we go this is Pat Keys Mill otherwise it's known as an arastra basically it's a primitive Mill that's used to grind and pulverize The Rock so imagine Flat Rocks on the bottom a circle like this throw the ore in and you basically are just dragging around a circle see this circle he established to you can see the perimeter of it so something would have walked around here sometimes it could be a human sometimes it could be a mule sometimes it could be steam powered turn the rocks in a circle and that's going to grind up your ore and this is a method that's been done since you know very long time ago I believe it was in the 16th century that the Spanish introduced the word and the word is basically means to drag around the ground and these were used because you see you can set them up just using the materials that are around here you didn't have to haul in heavy machinery it was inexpensive to set up it was something that you could do do just using the rocks in the area it's really cool so Pat would have brought down his ore dumped some in here grinded it up and probably had some type of SLO or similar somewhere around here it wouldn't have cost that much to get going you know a mule a pickaxe and you could start that was kind of the beginning of that American Western dream right you're going to come out here with a pickaxe find your claim you know figure out a way to make it happen and live a better life and I think that Pat keys at least my understanding financially uh was able to do [Music] that something that's kind of been my my staple over the last four years especially when I'm doing hikes like this is element it's an electrolyte powder it's got sodium potassium magnesium that's it in it no sugar anything like that and it just keeps me going on these hikes make sure they stay hydrated even when I'm in town I drink them to avoid any of those kind of dehydration headaches that I used to get a lot it's great you even when I'm conscious of how big my pack is easy to throw this in there I try to drink one or two of them a day and I just find that I have more energy and I just feel better um so I check it out you go to drink element.com Brent so drink element.com Brent they're giving away a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase so again you got to go drink element.com Brent I was drinking this stuff far before they ever uh sponsored this Channel and I drink it a lot when I'm not making videos and it really is the real deal so check it out drink element.com Brent it's going to make you feel better and keep me going on adventures like [Music] this well well well we're not quite all the way down in mcgoy canyon yet we got ourselves a little mining Shack made from the material they had with some tailings and some cribbing leading up to a mine up there this H day is part of a stamp Mill some type of pulverizer it's very heavy it's solid so I wonder if back in the day they had a mill here as well I read reports that Pat Keys would bring his ore over here for refining and so there's a possibility that there used to be a mill here I know that there's a great stamp Mill over in beverage that we're going to see before too long but I wonder if there's one here too to service this mine that has pretty decent tailings I mean that's a lot of rock so you figure maybe there's a pretty good uh Little Portal up there that they had going on this descent down into makoy Canyon is just insane I started up about 8,300 ft in elevation and the floor where I'm going is 5,300 ft in elevation so it's 3,000 ft of elevation loss in about a mile and it's just tiptoeing down with this heavy pack all the way down so I'm about 7,000 ft now in elevation so I still have another almost 2,000 ft to go bear with me this has been a couple hours trying to make it down into this Canyon my favorite part of going to these very obscure places is seeing signs of human life and trying to understand why those people were here and most of the time the answer is Mining and so that's the answer in this Canyon primarily you know there was maoy Canyon and that is why people knew it but these days this Canyon is much better known for a beekeeper which I think is just amazing a beekeeper way out here uh a few few days hike from the closest town and this all came about because I think in the 1980s some people started researching the area uh they were hiking up from the saline Valley side which is a lower descent to get up here and they found these waterfalls and these were 100t 200 foot waterfalls a series of waterfalls and in these waterfalls were these crazily constructed ladders made out of twine and wood that are going right up the waterfall that just looked insanely dangerous imagine a 200t waterfall with the handmade ladder made out of twine and some wood and so people started thinking what is going on here you know they made it up further in the canyon they found some huts and these Huts had beekeeping equipment in them it had the helmets you know the Nets the little smokers the cases and they're thinking what in the world what is somebody doing beekeeping so this was a big kind of mystery for a long time in this area and then finally in the 1990s they tracked him down The Beekeeper of Miguel boy Canyon and his name was Marian Howard and he grew up out east to an unsatisfying job at Chrysler I believe so he said I'm going west to make my living he packed up made his way to Lone Pine and in the 1960s he started just coming into this Canyon he would hike from Lone Pine which is at about 3,500 ft in elevation up and over kenot pass which is 11 ,000 ft in elevation and then back down here to 3,500 ft in elevation so this man was determined and throughout all those travels he never used a pack field it was just him and a canvas duffel sack and eventually he said hey you know what would be cool it'd be cool to you know tend to some bees out there and so that is what he started doing over here we have one of his smokers that is so so cool look at that I wonder if he made that where I imagine that's how you smoke out the bees oh my god oh one of his beekeeper Nets to keep the bees out I think these would have been for the Honeycombs these would have been the trays that are sat inside of the Combs to go in and out there's some Union Carbide there pile of clothes that are probably not so good these days and some straw it looks like this is his bed you can see there's canvas down he brought in a bunch of straw to act as his bed and oh man and there's this Kansas duffel sack like I read about the clothes are still in the canvas sack oh my God he wasn't lying there's his sack it's crazy to think that this is where you lived you know this is the few that he would have every day oh man that is so freaking cool talk about humanizing history I've read about this story for so long and how to be out here and see his place is just so cool that makes the whole trip worthwhile for me [Music] [Music] wow there is so much here look at that cribbing there's so much here all up this flat spot o there's a waterfall oh my God we found shanga out here I have to settle in here for the night cuz I feel like I got a lot to see around here I think this might be one of the most places I've ever been in my life I just can't believe that this is here and I was trudging down that trail earlier and I was regretting it honestly I thought oh man I'm killing myself to go to just another mining camp and then boom this lush green a field of wild flowers and a freaking waterfall it's just so unexpected it's so beautiful so peaceful here it's this idea of planed Discovery it's something I talk about a lot at s Gordo where you want to be led into something and you open it up and it's not what you expected but it's even better you know like at Soro kind of lead somebody into a cabin and they open it up and wow I didn't expect this but it gives the same feeling I got today you know when I got here I got very emotional it's the only word to describe it it's just so beautiful it's so serene [Music] [Music] I'm up to about 6,700 ft in elevation up from 5300 so I'm almost 1,400 ft up it's about half the gain that I have to do today a little less than half and I'm going to keep trekking towards the keyot mine complex which I'll talk about in a little bit but it was a huge mine back in the day with some more amazing stories kind of like our beekeeper that we just left behind first snake don't like that that was terrifying he's just going into the Rocks I don't like this Canyon anymore ready to be out of this Canyon doing a normal flat hike for a minute we are just starting to get into the keyot mining District you can see we got some stone cabins going on and back in 1970s this was a huge District of about seven or eight different claims they pulled about 30,000 ounces of gold out of these Hills right around here and the deepest M shaft here about 1,800 ft down so these are real mines and the majority of the mining here was either brought back to mvoy Canyon that we went to or up and over this Ridge into beverage Canyon which there is another huge mine that we're going to get to tomorrow as we get further down there was a mining operation that tried to get this going again I believe in the 70s or 80s so there's some more modern mining equipment that we're going to see wow and look as we're going down towards that mining equipment what we have we got track and on the track four carts multiple that is so cool even these even these would be hard to get in here with mules or however you're going to get them in cuz your car this is no brand on that one oh man look at that one over there it's still on the [Laughter] [Music] track doesn't move on the track that would be so freaking it [Music] does yeah hinck L Spears and Haze kind of Rhymes now where is this coming from assum a mine sheet metal easy building material ooh looks like our mine might have seen better days collapsed you see a big old Air pipe coming out of there too [Music] so all of this more mining equipment here in the keot complex was brought in in 1983 there's a company called the Far West exploration company and they helicoptered in this recovery plant and we're up at 8,000 ft in elevation so imagine helicoptering all of this in and they planed on building a road into here and doing all these things from my understanding they lasted less than a year and then they had to get out of here the problem was was water these operations especially a situation like this is very water intensive and so again look around we're at 8,000 ft no good trails to even get here and probably was not very profitable to helicopter and that much water you're going to need to use but I love the fact that these belts are still on the things are still here I think the reason that people like abandoned places generally is your mind can try to like fill in the gaps between what you see and what was here once that is crazy um I don't what is this whoa that is huge you can see the center of balance cuz they're helicoptering everything in and this thing they got all the way out here I think with the anticipation of building roads out like like fure way out and I want to hear you guys' thoughts I don't know the answer to this of how a bulldozer like this would get in here this thing must weigh 20 30,000 lb the seat needs a little work but it's also interesting to think that [Music] somebody parked right here almost 40 years ago now and this thing never moved again I wonder the excitement the day that this bulldozer got here and they were like oh wow we're going to get going we're about to strike it rich and the opposite the feeling when it didn't work out and they had to pack this thing up and [Music] leave I propped open in this container they have next to their generator and you look inside there's a lot of welding stuff which makes sense you can see the stems back there I don't know the exact word for them but welding stuff welding mask obviously there are welding most stuff together out here so they we're bringing it in pieces so that solves that we got some canvas bags some various Electronics a service manual for 12g crawler loaders so that's what must have been it was you need somebody out here can fix all this stuff cuz something's going to go wrong so what is this I assume this was a generator it says caterpillar d8800 that's what this thing was and I assume it's how they got their power that's just me trying to put two and two together I could be wrong though this is the engine they have powering this whole conveyor belt they have a couple engines but this is the main one it's a car engine I believe somebody can correct me if I'm wrong I think to fully appre appreciate this you got to appreciate where we are again tiny Trails really really hard trails to get in here and you have this and it's interesting I've read about the miners that lived here in the 1890s I didn't read that much about the people that came out here in the'80s I wonder like if they were coming and going exclusively by helicopter which could be a reason that it failed how long their shift was were there were they here for a week you know a month at a time this channel has a lot of people watching so if you knew anybody that worked at this keot mine complex in the 80s do let me know I'm very curious about how all this came to be I'd love to interview somebody if they worked out here that would be so cool oh oh wow look at that a huge Crucible look at this furnace look at that Crucible holy cow so they were doing some refining all the way out here too so that's another context GL I didn't know they're doing refining but that's like a commercial refiner right there so they're heating it up inside of this they would pour it out of that Crucible probably a cone mold somewhere around here that's awesome so they had a whole operation they were getting it all the way down to the Fine stuff out [Music] here so this keyot complex is the reason that probably this hike exists it is the reason that most people lived in any of these canyons and primarily they're mining right here there are seven or so claims but allog together there was I think about 50 people living here or was first discovered in 1878 they found gold they got very excited they called it the keynote mine eventually became the keyn not mine and by 1881 it was prime time you know they were producing a half a million a million dollars a year worth of ore all of which was being processed mostly over in beverage Canyon in the town of Beverage which has a five stamp Mill but try to imagine 50 people out here giving it their all and transporting their ore like three miles up and over these Canyons to get it processed this is it keot Canyon and ke not mine a big deal back in 1800s and a big deal again in the 1980s now we're off to beverage well the beverage Ridge cha tonight tomorrow beverage the most intact the most isolated Ghost Town out there oh and just like that look at what we have this would be the beverage Ridge cabin from my understanding back in the day they use this as a store and kind of an office for everything happening in between keyot and [Music] beverage this is the home for the night just a beautiful cabin me give you the tour let's head on in perfect place for me to write my next book got some beds fireplace big horn sheep skull Brent stuff this is very well stocked up a lot of really cool things in here and another thing to note and this mentions here but Wendel Moyer was kind of the guy who scouted and recreated The Lonesome miners Trail it's basically it was a number of different Trails you know back in the day and wend kind of connected all of them and he is just a big reason that this Trail is still possible to be able to hike and so I'm very thankful to him he was actually in the guest book back in M Eloy Canyon I'll never be able to pronounce that um but Wendell Legend Legacy lives on with things like this today day three it's probably the hardest day I would say um just getting out of like elvoy Canyon it's really hard not just cuz of the 3,000 ft in elevation gain but the trail was just gone it was just Boulders your Trail finding a lot just took a lot of time I think I was probably had a moving time of 10 and 1 half 11 hours today the hike has helped me have like actual thoughts that Mak sense I I think it's easy these days to kind of almost let your thoughts be guided on what's on social media what's being fed to you in your algorithm because of the feed or whatever and out here I felt kind of after like day two breaking out of that and just having thoughts about the town about what I want to do with it that I found really impactful and so I got to remember to do more of these it's really hard to carve out time away it feels like every day away from work is the day that you should be working but I think that these almost reset the clock and allow you to come back and be let's say instead of 70% efficient you're 80% then you're getting more done in the long run beverage is kind of the grand finale tomorrow luxury living tonight we got a roof over our heads and like that I think it's time to call it a day [Music] we're losing about I think about 3,000 ft this morning and by day four of this hike my knees are feeling a little tender and the downhills will get you on these hikes but I'm excited to get back to beverage it's beautiful there's a lot of history to be told there I'm excited to see what I noticed for the same second time cuz as I say you never step in the same river twice because you're a different person and so is the river and here it is beverage Canyon can't see the town quite yet but soon we should come across an aerial Tramway that are using to actually pull or way up here in this Hillside and take it down to the stamp Mill down below before we know it we're down to one of the tram stations and again this tram was taking ore from up on that Hillside where they had a mine you can kind of see the little cart up there all the way down to here all the way down into the canyon where the water is and the stamp Mill is I wonder too if they brought some of the um stuff from the keynot from up there too cuz that would save them allot of Transit down on mules they just kind of revolutionized mining when they happened you suddenly you could span great expanses bring down ore much easier you know I always like to say this like when the buckets were in the Air Above This Canyon for instance sometimes miners are right out of the buckets and that was before commercial airlines were flying so that feeling of being suspended th000 ft in the air looking down would have been one that nobody else in the world would have had at that point but as you can see in a few years this is just going to be dust uh a lost memory to time what once was down at the end of the Tramway way down in the canyon the beginning of Beverage [Music] the ouse to Nowhere look at what this thing is supported by it's supported by a branch barely hanging on over a drop of oh I don't know 8 ft that is something else so this is the stamp Mill and you can see has those poles 1 2 3 4 5 and on the bottom are very heavy Mallet basically and has these bigger Wheels spin those turn those to go up down smash smash smash smash smash and you crush up your gold or like that these wheels most were constructed I probably on site cuz unlike the keyot mine they weren't bringing any of this on helicopter all this was built in place and uh lived here so it's interesting now to see it deteriorating you know the trees are coming back there's something a little poetic about it so you can see the stamps there that are crushing up the ore and right next to it is a boiler so I imagine this is creating steam to power this wheel to crush all the ore they needed to crush so down in here been feeding it charcoal or otherwise kept it going and back in the day they were running this thing 12 hours a day so it was a busy place I think that it's always interesting when we come to these places and it's so Serene you can even see little floaters in the air as it light trickles through towards the stream and it seems very peaceful back when this was a mining camp this was anything but peaceful this thing was banging and cl flashing and boom boom boom 12 hours a day as you're coming up the Valley from beverage there's all these old encampments from the beverage settlement like down there you see this cool Stone building and I try to think like how long did that take to build and how long is it going to last you can tell they used to have a wooden roof on it the beam fell in but the walls are still there it's still good [Music] and like that goodbye once again beverage I don't know when I'll see you again but I hope I do and up ahead hidden in that Thicket of rose bushes in the cabin goes by Frenchie's cabin these days and I love again the kind of plan surprise over and walking up here nothing is visible yet in just a moment I'm going show you a really cool bit of Inyo County there we go home sweet home where the water's flowing o is that a good sight to see right now hello is anyone home oh we're back full Frenchie's cabin a classic where I spent some good days a couple years ago look about how I left it spend some good nights on these beds and out here this is your view come on over here pretty [Music] nice this place is really special this is a place that kind one of my first big Ts Adventures solo Into the Wilderness and really just fell in love with all of these Canyons kind of how things go I heard about beverage then heard about the LMT and then I've now seen all different canyons and coming back feels a little bit like homecoming it feels very special and I do honestly grapple with the idea of sharing these videos um this is something that I didn't know if I was going to talk about but I'm thinking that you know there is a certain amount of gatekeeping that is done with very special places that mean a lot to a lot of people because we've seen so many of these great places destroyed over the years and a place like beverage of like the French's cabin here is no different than that with this big video My Hope isn't to get you to come and Hike The Lonesome miners Trail if you do shoot me a message I will be more than happy to give you any type of information or learning that I had on this the point is to get out there in your own backyard you know understand the history bring it back to life discover some little rabbit hole you want to go down and learn something new and just do that wherever you are so I think the feeling feelings that I've had along the trail are replicatable no matter where you are in the world and no matter what you're doing and so the idea is more just to get out there in whatever way you can try to understand the world around you and just allow that color to fill in I think final thing I'll say is if you do choose to go on these Adventures whether it's the beverage or elsewhere be very respectful you know the reason that this place is so special the reason that people enjoy coming here is because of what is here and so it's very important this stuff stays here you know every little bit every little even down under the Rocks I won't take rocks cuz I don't even want that type of Bad Karma um but leave everything where it is pack everything that you bring in out and just try to keep these places for future generations to enjoy and that was it four hard days on the trail I think more than a few times I dreamt of the helicopter from keyot coming and taking me out of there and taking me away then I thought about the miners who built the trails who weren't back there for leisure who weren't there just for a glimpse into the past they were there to work to try to bring their dreams to life and that's a feeling I can resonate with a feeling that I've pursued over the past four years living in a mining town just south of them and being on the trail humanizes the experience it allows me to remember that we've been the same for a really long long time and that act of remembering is really important each rusted name on the old Machinery each faded name inside the old log books the history that I read before I went on the trail it all illuminates the beauty of that shared Human Experience of those that came before us of those that are going to come later I think whole books could be written about the towns I stepped into of the individuals in each of the towns but those books aren't written those people are mostly forgotten and that's a bit hard because I feel like we have an obligation to remember that those that came before us because memory is a sacred trust and to remember is an Act of Creation or renewal it's a ritual that binds the past and the present together and by doing that connection you make the world around you that much richer so I'm very grateful to be able to explore these far away places and shine a bit more of a light on the history there and I'm even more grateful that I get to share those histories here because together we're able to weave that web of understanding further and further out so I just want to say thank you for coming along on these adventures with me for participating in that Act of remembering the past of caring about the past I hope you all take a little time to dig deeper into the histories all around you and by doing so make the world a little brighter and remember it's one of most important things that we can do so thank you guys and I'll see you next time [Music]
