
An earlier and cooler morning for this day’s travels! This day was devoted to geology, scenery and concluding what has been an elusive hunt for the last resting place of Johnny Lang.
An aside. Thanks to digital cameras small storage footprint and the ability to delete at no cost, I take a lot of pictures. Sometimes they are good (very occasionally), sometimes they are so-so (more often than not), and sometimes they are junk. However, sometimes the junk ones are the ones that you wanted the most. I generally have a suspicion or even awareness when I think a photo is not going to turn out. My problem is that as I take the photo, in the back of my mind, I hear Seals and Crofts singing “We May Never Pass This Way” which way back in 1973 had a very defining influence on me. So here is the picture I am talking about. Later in the day with a different sun angle, this would have been, as Captain Ron says, “A CLASSIC”. For now, you have to squint a bit to see that the shadowed figure in the lower portion of photo is Joni.

Our park day began with a stop not far from the West Entrance at an outcrop of the most prevalent and iconic rock type in the park, 85- to 100-million-year-old quartz monzonite (lets simplify that to granite). A geologist who I follow on U2ube had stopped there and got into a discussion of aplite. I’m thinking, my old (never refuse a free drink) petrology professor never mentioned aplite…what on gods great flat earth is an aplite? The U2ber explained and I looked it up.

The lighter colored rock below the beer bottle opener, cheese cutter, nail cleaner is a classic aplite. You may be saying “Whoa there PacoPegmatite, Thats a pegmatite”. Nay Nay; here is a pegmatite right next to the pretty lady shivering in the electric socks on a different trip to JTNP.

Aplite is a fine-grained intrusive (never has seen the light of day until the magic of uplift and erosion) igneous rock, that has cooled relatively quickly. It forms in later stages of magma cooling relatively deep in the bowels of the earth usually in narrow fractures or small spaces, when the primary minerals left in the gooey or liquid stew are quartz, feldspar and mica … (for the non-geologist recognizing two out of three is a passing grade). It has a light color and a uniform sugary texture. So, the aplite may be a couple of tens of thousands of years younger than the 200-million-year-old granite it is found in.
Pegmatites are a coarse-grained intrusive rock (same basic recipe as aplite with the addition of potentially rare minerals, gold for instance) that forms from the slow cooling of magma, leading to extremely large crystals. Usually, pegmatites are formed in larger veins or voids in the magma. Similar types of goo as aplite, but much slower cooling rate. Pegmatites as solid chunks of rock might be many tens to hundreds of thousands of years younger than the rock you find it in.
Field Trip















Johnny Lang
Johnny Lang was a gentleman of questionable moral turpitude (as many of the inhabitants of the Joshua Treen NP area in the late 1800’s were) who, for whatever reason, had his life chronicled in some detail. What follows are excerpts from an article written by Allison Johnson entitled The Lost Horse Gold Mine.
Johnny was born in Texas in 1850, he began as a cattle rancher. In the 1890s, he and his father moved west with their grazing herds. At some point Johnny was the proprietor of the first saloon in Twentynine Palms. However, he and his father had serious gold fever, and they gave up their cows to search for riches beyond their wildest dreams. We lose track of dad Lang around this time. However, we know that Johnny’s efforts paid off. The Lost Horse Mine was the area’s most successful mine. Most of the gold the Lost Horse Mine would ever produce – nine thousand troy ounces – was extracted during the first ten years of operation, at the turn of the 20th century. Johnny Lang figures in every version of the mine’s discovery, the common factor being that the legendary prospector found the mine while in pursuit of his wandering horse. One story, although it seems that it was formulated after the fact due to Johnny’s bias, suggests that while looking for his horse, he sat on a rock to dislodge a stone from his shoe when he looked down, he saw the dull yellow of gold. About that time, a group of cattle-rustlers – the infamous McHaney Brothers among them – discovered Lang in their vicinity. They threatened Johnny off.
Not to be deterred and tired of walking, Johnny reunited with his horse in the rustler’s camp who admitted that they had confiscated it. On inquiry, assuredly over cocktails, they directed Johnny to “Dutch Frank” Diebold’s camp where Diebold revealed to him that he had discovered a large gold strike but had been unable to claim it because of interference from the McHaneys. Lang purchased the claim rights from Diebold for one thousand dollars, and he took on partners with enough clout to move on it. The partners eventually sold their shares to the Ryan brothers (Ryan Mountain from previous blogs) and Johnny took over the night shift at the mine.
Suspicions were aroused when the Lost Horse processing plant’s night shift operations (Johnny’s watch) produced significantly less gold than that of the day shift. After setting up a “sting,” the Ryans confronted Lang with a choice of selling his stake or going to jail. Lang sold his portion for twelve thousand dollars.
The aging prospector moved into a deserted cabin in an area near Hidden Valley, later named Johnny Lang Canyon, where he worked a smaller claim. At some point, he moved into Keys’ Desert Queen Ranch for a time, but the arrangement was never comfortable because of Johnny’s reputation as a thief. While at the Desert Queen Ranch, Johnny began selling large amounts of gold to Bill Keys, too great a quantity to have come from his small mine in Johnny Lang Canyon. Keys and others believed that the miner was secretly refining the gold he had skimmed and buried in earlier years. When the Lost Horse Mine was finally abandoned, Lang returned to his former haunt, taking up residence in an old shack that had served as a kitchen.
On a winter morning in 1925, Johnny Lang rolled up his canvas sleeping bag and packed what remained of his supplies, a half-slice of bacon and a small sack of flour. He would have to hoof it from his mining site in hopes of catching a freight wagon into Banning, some fifty miles away. Gone were his burros. He had eaten those one by one. The seventy-five-year-old prospector slung his gear over his shoulder, and tacked a note, dated January 25th, to the ramshackle desert hut that served as his home: “Gone for grub. Be back soon.”
Three months later, Bill Keys and two companions were constructing the road to what is now Keys View, and they happened upon Johnny’s mummified body. The burnt remnants of a nearby bush and the thin sleeping bag that Johnny was wrapped in left the men to conjecture that the old miner had died when he stopped to make camp… probably partially brought on by mercury poisoning from exposure to the gold amalgam he had “acquired” on the night shift and was processing in lieu of social security checks :).
So, alas, Johnny could rest in peace. Hold on there… not really. In 1983, morons robbed the grave site of Mr. Lang taking his skull and bones. However, the grave site remained, was restored and is reportedly on the road to Keys View near the Lost Horse Mine Road. We finally found the grave on this trip. Again, some bad sun angles but pictures of the discovery.




Kiara had to leave later in the evening for work the next day, so we celebrated the birthday a little early by heading down to Morongo Valley to a restaurant called Spaghetti Western. Very commendable Italian fare accompanied by live light jazz and on our visit interspersed with some jazzed-up versions of Christmas carols.