After a long hiatus from the blog in favor of spending my time on more enticing activities, like getting out and actually doing the hiking trips which is the backbone of content around here, I log in today and come to be standing 1.5 years backlogged. My, does time fly. Not sure when that backlog is going to get taken care of, but maybe one day I’ll catch a substantial break.
Hopping back on the horse with a simple write-up of Jumbo Mine, which happens to be chronologically next anyways, but it also happens to be one which I’ve already done the work of culling the photos on.
Additionally, the National Park Service has done the work of writing up the hiking details for those looking to reach Jumbo Mine (attached below). One tip I’ll say again, and which goes for any trip to McCarthy is to bring bikes, that way you can operate on your own timeline and not be confined to the timeline of the shuttle buses (which shut down waaayy too early in the land of the midnight sun). You can’t drive across the bridge, but you can bring bikes and bike the remaining 5 miles to Kennecott pretty easily.
July 30, 2021
For this trip, Rowland, his girlfriend, and his dog “Fox”, and myself drove down to McCarthy. Jumbo Mine was the selected hike as something of moderate size for the day and on a previous trip up Bonanza Peak I had noticed in my photos a visible green patch of ore. Being visible on the camera indicated to me it must be large and I was curious of it, visiting Jumbo Mine would be able to put the curiosity to rest.
It was an insanely hot day. Two of the three structures pictured in the NPS pdf attachment were no longer standing. And so, their unphotogenic rubble was passed up in favor of chasing around the cliffsides to find the source of those green pixelations my camera had found two years prior from atop Bonanza Peak. Some National Park people came in by helicopter for a couple hours to do an annual check on the locked gate barring entry to the underground mine system. We did successfully find some of that deep, dense, green rock. And then we hiked back to Rowland’s campervan.
From Rocks To Rivers 