There is no mention of Boreal Toads.
Click on the image to humongify it.
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Since it rained much of the time, there aren't a lot of pictures...
Notes:
Once again thunder, rain, and lightning - but not necessarily in that order.
While driving to the parking lot I could see that we were probably not going to do a high-altitude ridge run this week again. By the time I got there, the storm front had moved generally to the east of the valley and bright flashes and deep rumblings could be seen and heard in the general direction of "up-canyon".
Surprisingly, someone else showed up - several "someones." Since there were just six of us, we crammed into Bryan's Hummer 2 and headed up to what was now an obvious choice among the traditional "safe" and "ridge-free" hikes - Cardiff Fork.
When we arrived at the trailhead it wasn't raining - yet - but the up-side was that there were plenty of parking space - often a problem as this trailhead is also shared by those that are headed to Donut Falls. Starting on the trail, one soon switches the the access road and heads up-canyon. We had been hiking for only about 15 minutes when it finally made up its mind and decided to rain, forcing us to make the choice of either getting wet from the rain or get wet from the condensation within our respective pieces of rain gear: Everyone chose the latter. As is often the case in the mountains, the areas of rain can be fairly localized, so we were often able to see stretches of blue sky to the north while the ridges above us were frequently bathed in alpenglow from breaks in the clouds, treating us to the occasional rainbow and underlit cloud. At about this time we noticed a rather noisy two-engine plane buzz the ridge. We would have thought nothing of this except that it buzzed by again... and again... and again. The conjecture was that since it was known that traffic at Salt Lake International was backed up (as reported by Elaine who, at around 4 PM, reported to Ron that she was still waiting for her 2-ish PM flight) that the pilot was told to maintain a holding pattern.
Eventually, the road crosses the stream - which wasn't really being amplified by the light rain - and starts up a fairly gentle grade on the east side of the canyon. Before too long, a number of mine dumps heave into view, soon followed by one of the few mostly-intact buildings - what was apparently either a stamp mill or a transfer station. We decided not to stop here, but rather to continue up the road to the vicinity of what had likely been a bunkhouse. Along the road we noticed what seemed to be some newer "No Trespassing" signs in the trees off the sides of the roads that seemed to admonish those who would explore the surrounding mine and building ruins not to do so: We had no reason not to heed these.
Once we arrived in the general area of the bunkhouse, we called Gordon - who had been keeping his own pace - on the radio. He had just caught sight of the old workings and was on his way up - but since we decided to go back down again at about this point, we met him in the general area of some of the lower ruins. There, we finally re-grouped, took the group picture and wondered how long what appeared to be a new-ish set of wooden benches sitting atop one of the mine dumps had been there...
By this time it had stopped raining and was getting fairly dark, so we headed down - which seemed to cause it to start to rain again. On the return trip there was some slight urgency as the gate was posted to close at 10 PM and we didn't really know how rigidly that was enforced. As is often the case with this hike we managed to miss the point at which we'd joined the road on the way up, but we just continued down the road knowing that it only caused a few hundred feet of detour at the very bottom and was, in all likelihood, easier and faster to navigate in the dark than our originally-intended route.
The majority of the group arrived at the parking lot a few minutes before 10 PM and soon we saw the tell-tale illumination of the trees by headlights as the sheriff approached: Asking us if we were waiting for someone or planning to stay the night, we told him that we had two people out - perhaps 5-10 minutes away. Having no problem with this, he went back to the gate and waited for us. Bruce appeared first - having followed the road - and about 5 minutes after that we saw Gordon's tell-tale bobbing green light coming toward us on the trail.
Piling back into the vehicle again, we headed out - thanking the sheriff waiting at the gate for doing so - and headed back down canyon where we went our separate ways.
About the Cardiff Mine and surrounding area:
The Cardiff Mine area was worked into the 50's or 60's - largely by Desdemona Beeson - one of the few female mining engineers in Utah. Lead (mainly from Galena and Cerussite) and some silver ores were the main products of the mines in Cardiff fork. Above the remnants of the buildings is the Baby McKee mine - near which the remains of a steam boiler may be seen. This portal seems to be connected in some way to the Howell Tunnel located across the canyon (on the west side) from the Cardiff mine.The Utah Mine Locations page of the Trainweb site give the location of many of the mines in the area.
According to Keller, a 1/2 ton chunk of Galena was dragged out of the Mill-D South Fork in 1871, with the first claim having been filed in the area the previous year. Despite the initial hype, the flurry of activity fizzled until a large body of Galena was discovered at what was called the Carbonate Mine in 1876 and by the following January, shipments were reported to be 1200 ore sacks daily. Gradually, the output of the mine dropped - due to lower ore prices or lack of enthusiasm by the owners, and by 1880, it was being leased and worked only intermittently. It wasn't until 1908 that operations resumed with the installation of a 4000-foot long, 8-tower gravity tramway on the east side - but this operation fizzled again after 1910 and operations at the Carbonate mine seemed to have stopped for good by 1916.
It wasn't until 1906 that the Cardiff Mining and Milling company came into existence, taking over a number of claims farther up the south fork, the name being the Welsh hometown of several of the company's principals. In many ways, this was quite a modern mine, originally getting power via Park City in 1910 and telephone service soon after. Further improvements included a better road and a large bunkhouse above the mine - probably the one that we visited in 2007. In 1911, work was started on a long tunnel to reach an ore body that had previously been discovered - but was uneconomical due to large amounts of water. Eventually, in 1914, another large ore body was reached and the mine began to prosper economically. With the increase in traffic due to ore shipments, the water quality in the canyon suffered - both from the use of a lot of horses to transport the material, as well as erosion from such activity. Several schemes were tried which included the use of transfer stations, tractors with trailer, and large trucks, but it wasn't until 1921 that enough improvements had been made to the machinery and roads that they stopped using horses altogether.
The above information was from the book "The Lady in the Ore Bucket" by Charles Keller: This book is recommended reading if you find the history of this area to be interesting.
Comments about pictures/video/audio taken by Clint:
- All images taken using a Sigma Digital SLR camera and were taken using the lens noted in the EXIF data. (Usually, an SD-14.)
- Because all of the images were originally taken stored in raw binary format, they have been down-processed to .JPG for web posting: If requested, different color/contrast/brightness may be applied and/or higher-quality uncompressed versions may be available for most of these images.
- If you want one (or more) of these images and wish some sort of adjustment (color, brightness, exposure, etc.) please let me know: All of these image have been processed in some way.
- These images are numbered in chronological order.
- No-one ever said that all of these images (or any of them) were good. Some of them may have definite focus/exposure "issues."
- EXIF data is present for most of the images, showing time, date, and precise exposure conditions. Recent versions of Irfanview will show this in the "View->Image Information->EXIF" tab.
- Note that cropping/noise reduction required the use of another program which may have removed some/most of this EXIF data.
- Images suffixed with "h" (if any) are half-size. This was done for images that were somewhat out of focus (due to misfocus or camera/subject movement associated with long shutter times) or those that required some extra noise reduction and had lost some detail anyway. Additional suffixes of the image file name may include "sh" to indicate that some "de-blurring" was done, "mb" for correction of motion blur, and "c" or "crop" denoting that the image was cropped.
- If you took some pictures of the hike and send them to me, I'll post them - and give you the blame!
- The video clips, if any, were shot using a Panasonic DMC FZ-8 digital camera, have been re-compressed, and are of lower quality than the originals.
- Audio clips, if any, were recorded using a Zoom H-2 audio recorder.
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This page maintained by Clint Turner, KA7OEI and was last updated on 20100810 (Copyright 2010 by Clint Turner and those credited above. All rights on images and text are reserved.)
