With over three million visitors a year and climbing, Joshua Tree National Park’s weekend crowds can make hiking in the park hard for those who live here year-round.
If you are like me, you don’t see Joshua Tree National Park much on weekends. During the spring season when visitation is at its highest, I’ll only get inside the park on a Saturday or Sunday if I have visitors in town and they’ll need to wake up early enough to make it in before the long lines start to form. On Sunday mornings the hi-desert seems to be moving a little slower which means I can squeeze in a breakfast at the Palms before circling back and entering the park through the much less-busy Twentynine Palms entrance.
Soon we may be battling hot days along with long lines, making weekend treks into the park more trouble than its worth for those with limited days off. However the sun is staying up longer as we move toward the summer solstice, and there are plenty of hikes and loops inside Joshua Tree National Park that you can do in the late afternoon on a weekday before the sun slips behind the hills.
Desert Queen Mine Trail
The Desert Queen Mine trail is a short 3-ish mile there-and-back hike with minimal elevation changes and a whole lot of big open landscapes that are beautiful to behold in the raking golden light of the late afternoon. It’s about 14 miles inside Joshua Tree National Park from the west entrance in the Pine City Zone, and on a Wednesday at 3:30 in the afternoon the parking lot only had one other car in it.
The trail itself has varied terrain but it’s pretty easy-going. I did the hike in Chuck Taylor’s when I realized I left my hiking boots in Flamingo Heights, but you will run into some rocky scrambles and steep inclines as you hike up toward the now abandoned gold mine. The mines themselves have been blocked-off and caved-in for visitor safety, although you can still go inside some of the more horizontal mine entrances a dozen feet or so.
Link: Desert Queen Mine Trail at AllTrails
Some mining equipment and an old homestead cabin remain in the area, and if you are a casual rockhound there is plenty to be found out here. Some small fields of quartz and chrysocolla are scattered around the mines, but all the gold is either still hidden deep in the monzonite or was gathered up by a turn-of-the-century miner whose fortune was short-lived.
According to the National Register of Historic Places which has the original 1975 application for the Desert Queen Mine, a man listed as just “A. James” discovered gold in the area in the early 1890’s. James’ fortune didn’t last, however, as he was shot and killed after signing over the mine to a local cattle rustler named Jim McHaney. McHaney operated the mine until it passed into the hands of William Keys around 1917, who continued to mine it sporadically until 1961.
Even if you don’t get off work until 5:00 o’clock there is still plenty of daylight left to burn on a weekday inside the park. If you have some favorite short hikes or loops that you’d like to see featured, send them to me.
Download the National Park Service App and be sure to download any maps you want to access while you are inside the park, as there isn’t any reliable service in the majority of Joshua Tree National Park.
Links:
Desert Queen Mine Trail (alltrails.com)
Pine City Zone (nps.gov)
“Joshua Tree National Park to Close Abandoned Mines in Restoration Project” (nps.gov)
Original 1975 Application to National Register of Historic Plances, courtesy of http://npshistory.com/
