According to Oxford Languages, ‘doggone’ can be an adjective used to express feelings of annoyance, surprise, or pleasure, or a verb used to express surprise, irritation, or anger. That is one versatile word.
For the past several years, ever since being introduced to the area by a friend and neighbor, I have been exploring the old mines and workings off of what I call Airport Road. Formally, it is Forest Service Rd. (FSR) 235, a dirt track that goes north, towards the Patagonia Mountains, from the east side of State Route (SR) 82 between mile markers 9 and 10 above Nogales International Airport.
The land there has a rich history. There are, I have been told by a reliable source, metates in the wash that continues to carve out what is called either Tascala Canyon (according to Google Earth) or Taskeles Canyon (according to a USGS map, date uncertain).
Whichever name you choose, you go along FSR 235 until you are 1.7 miles in from SR 82. There you can turn right onto Paloma Rd. and somewhere in the wash down below, the First Nations people used a grinding stone to prepare food. I’ve walked up and down that wash several times and I have not located the metate yet, but, doggone it, I am determined to.
About 3.1 miles further in on FSR 235, the land becomes host to a plethora of mines and diggings. This is the Palmetto Mining District, a lung-shaped area of rolling hills, washes and deeply faulted mountain crevices approximately ten miles across at its widest and 15 miles top to bottom at its longest.
Mindat.org’s list of some 40 mines within the district reads like a journal of the dreams of the prospectors that worked them. Native Silver Mine. Gold Standard Mine. Hollywood Mine. Denver Mine. San Lou Mine. The Prosperity Group. The New Hope Mine.
The most famous, and probably the most productive of the group, is the Three-R-Mine, named after its principal owner Rollin Rice Richardson, which sits a little over three miles away and 1000 feet above the Circle Z Ranch.
Everywhere in and amongst the mines are exquisite ruins. Some are laid-up stone walls and the remnants of domicile foundations. Some are concrete abutments, with large metal bolts still protruding, that supported the massive headframes used for the lowering of miners into, and the heavy ore loads out of, the shafts that they lorded over.
Rails for ore carts can still be found twisted on the ground, removed from their underground routes but not fully salvaged, most likely because it was preferable to work with a straight track when trying to bend a new route through a new mountain.
On a recent crisp (read: snakeless) December morning my wife and I set out for the Billie D, a former gold mine on an unnamed hill in the Palmetto Mining District. I had visited this hill several times. It housed not only the Billie D but also the Denver Mine where they chased mostly lead and copper.
The Denver consists of a collapsed horizontal adit on the lower level and a collapsed vertical shaft about 350 feet higher up on the hill. Somehow “350 feet” does not do justice to the effort required to get up that hill. One has to slowly switch back and forth avoiding a route that ends up facing out at a small but unconquerable—by me anyway—cliff. Avoiding the things that might stick you and draw blood. Avoiding loose rock that suddenly pitches you forward or jolts you backward. The journey is arduous. The elevation gain and loss are measured. Prospectors came this way with pack animals looking for a promising place to put pickaxe and shovel to profitable work.
My wife and I had set out for a return trip to the Billie D because three weeks prior I had located an opening and now I wanted to explore it. Flashlights, helmet and water gathered, I wanted to go in and see what vein, what dream, was being chased.
When we arrived, the opening had been bat barred. Doggone. After perhaps 70 years of benign neglect I was thwarted moments before I was going to enter. We turned away and explored elsewhere that day.
I went back alone a few weeks later. There were two other smudges of waste rock on the hillside that I wanted to look at.
Walking along a hillside path I came to an old trench digging that now had some trash in it. The path and the trash were made by someone making the hard walk from some faraway country chasing a dream like some long-ago prospector.
Seeing that migrant detritus made me wonder about the conditions that would compel someone to make that hard journey.
We begin our lives with zero memories. We collect them, slowly at first, by trying to ascribe meaning to our lived experience. Starting, all is pristine, then the layering of life begins and we find ourselves, at turns, surprised, pleasured, annoyed, irritated, or angered.
We walk hillsides in search of a streak of riches or we walk hillsides in search of a life free from deprivation.
In the end, we are all bat-barred from entry into permanent happiness because… we age. Things change when we are not looking.
Eventually, after all the digging and moving, we all come to the same place. 50-year friends will contract cancer and slip away. Pets will get old and die.
Doggone.
Keith Krizan can be contacted at therealkbkkbk@gmail.com