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The River of Gold
Near my usual camp on Cima Dome — two and a half hours’ hike away — is a small mountain of limestone. It rises abrupt and aloof, ridges of hard sediment tilted almost perpendicular to level, the softer stuff in between eroded away into scree and talus, sterile stony soil to hold up the Joshua trees and junipers.
There are caves in the limestone, passages hollowed out by the once-relentless passage of Pluvial-era water, stalactites that grew when the desert was sodden but no longer. Thirty miles away a similar network of caverns is a California State Park, and tourists in flip-flops gawk at illuminated colonnades as they stomp down handrailed stairs. These caves are silent, though, aside from the calls of saw-whet owls and the night’s coyote arias, the wind out of Arizona through the limbs of Joshuas. Paleontologists have pulled old bones out of them, lizards and squirrels twelve thousand years old or more.
There is a broad river flowing a mile beneath the rock.
Or so, at least, it is said. A century ago three Native brothers working the Dorr Ranch in the east Mojave went out to look for caves described by their tribal elders — of which tribe it is not known — and found a cleft in the rock. From the entrance cavern a passage descended unfathomably deep into the earth, and at its base there was yet more descent.
Thirty years later, in December 1934 Earl Dorr filed a notarized affidavit describing his descent into the cave the Peysert brothers had shown him.
A Civil Engineer, Mr. Morton, and I spent four days exploring the cave for more than eight miles. We carried with us Altimeters, Pedometers, and a Theodolite, with which to observe and record actual directions, take elevations and measurements by triangulation. Our exploration revealed the following facts: 1. From the mouth of the cave we descended as shown by the Altimeters to be about 2000 feet, where we encountered a canyon, which from the Altimeters and by calculations we found to be from 3000 to 3500 feet deeper; making total depth of 5400 feet from the mouth where we entered the caves to the floor of the canyon.
We found the cave divided into many caverns or chambers, of various sizes, all filled and embellished with Stalactites and Stalagmites, besides many grotesque and fantastic shapes that make these caves one of the wonders of the world.
The largest chamber we explored is about 300 ft. wide, 400 feet long and from 50 to 110 feet high. It is encrusted with crystals, fashioned into festoons of innumerable Stalactites, that hang from the ceiling, some of which are extremely large.
One, the largest seen, is 27 feet in diameter and hangs 1510 feet down into a 3000 ft. canyon. This great Stalactite is perpetually washed by water flowing down over it and falling into the dark canyon depths. The huge glistening white crystal is 500 feet longer than the Eiffel Tower, and challenged us with amazement and wonder.
There is a flowing river on the floor of the canyon, which rises and falls with tidal regularity. All measurements and estimates of the river, including its tides and beach sands were reckoned by triangulation, taken with the Theodolite, and while we did not reach the river, nevertheless, taking observations with our theodolite and its telescope, we reckoned the river to be about 300 feet wide at high tide and 10 feet wide at low tide. It rises and falls from 7 to 8 feet. The Peysert brothers confirm our reckoning.
The next part of the affidavit ensured that the legend would be kept alive.
When the tide is out, there is exposed on both sides of the river from 100 to 159 feet of black sand, which the Peysert brothers report is very rich in placer gold. They report the sands on the river shore to be from 4 to 11 feet deep; and on an average about 8 feet deep.
There are numerous ledges above the canyon that are from 10 to 40 feet wide and covered with sand. We personally explored the ledge sands for a distance of more than eight miles, finding little variation in the depth and width of these ledge sands. And wherever examined, the ledge sands are found to be fabulously rich in placer gold…
Both Mr. Morton and myself filled our pockets with the sands from the ledges, carried it out and had it assayed. Just what Mr. Morton’s sand assayed, I do not know, but it was approximately $2000. per ton. I carried out ten pounds and two ounces of the ledge sand, and panned seven pounds, recovering more than $7.00 in gold, with gold at $20.00 an ounce. I sold the gold for $18.00 per ounce.
Those pockets full of sand would be worth close to three hundred bucks today, each bank of that river holding more than two million dollars worth of black sand per linear foot, and thus in the fifty years since Earl Dorr died a number of attempts have been made to find the deep cavern. The most recent enterprise has abandoned the notion of finding the original passage, and is instead attempting to drill down through the desert to reach the deeply hidden “3,000 foot canyon.”
The story is improbable in the extreme, to put it mildly. There may be a deep cavern, perhaps a very deep cavern. I will leave it to the structural engineers to say whether one could build a 1500-foot stalactite out of calcite and not have it shatter under its own weight. I will say that mine promoters have often, in the last two centuries of western American history, made statements from which, if you stood on their most verifiable parts, the periphery of the actual truth could be dimly seen out on the far horizon. Phoenix has its Lost Dutchman mine, Bishop its Lost Cement mine, and dozens of others lure unwary prospectors, gullible investors.
Anyway, few places have been seismically explored as thoroughly as the Mojave, and the notion of an undiscovered hollow 3000 feet deep and at least eight miles in length is laughable.
But I can’t let go of that river of gold.
Not the gold itself. Were it there, I’d say “leave it in the ground.” From an environmental point of view, the gold would be the least valuable of the cavern’s contents, and mining would destroy the cave for all but miners.
No, it is the river itself that has caught me up in its current. There is something about deep tunnels to the ocean and I have heard such things said about more than one place, always in the realm of wild speculation or local legend. Growing up near New York’s deep Seneca Lake I heard schoolboy tales of undiscovered passages between the lake bottom and the Atlantic. The lake was said to have tides, its level rising and falling on a slow but notable daily rhythm. (This was later explained to me as an effect of the more prosaic but still lovely seiche, periodic sloshing in a lake 38 miles long by three wide, three days from high tide to high tide.)
A freshwater warm spring in Nevada near Death Valley has also been rumored to have deep oceanic connections. Devil’s Hole is best known for its resident pupfish, a unique species that has been limited in range to one small submerged rock ledge since the last Pluvial. The spring is very deep: at least 400 feet deep, measurement complicated by the spring’s branching into a network of deep limestone caves. But the spring is certainly not connected to the ocean. If it were, the water level would be somewhat lower: the banks of Devil’s Hole are at 2400 feet above sea level.
Earl Dorr claimed his river of gold flowed toward the Gulf of California. There is, in fact, a river flowing from the vicinity of his cave toward the Gulf. It is called the Colorado, and it has been rather well explored. More than 260 miles from that little limestone hill to the Colorado Delta, and much of that distance made up of impermeable igneous rock: Dorr’s river has its work cut out for it, and it really ought to collaborate with its above-ground cousin.
It cannot possibly exist. How could it? But I have felt that river, waking on frozen nights out on the ground at three in the morning. I have felt it flow a mile beneath my shoulder blades. I have walked and whistled along the tule banks of the San Buenaventura, cast lines into the Timpanogos, and I have sighed a little to awake to this landlocked West, in a time after Fremont killed the rivers of legend and the engineers took care of the remainder. I drove one winter toward Los Angeles and a ghost appeared, Tulare Lake come from the dead, a winter of flood spread silver across acres of dead cotton fields and the teal and mallards on its brow swimming where fifty generations of their ancestors could not. I walk each morning past rainforest and tree fern, built on an arid waste of sand by drowning a Yosemite.
Dorr’s River does not exist, it cannot possibly exist, and it is a mile down a lost and legendary hole besides, and so there will be no dams to block its flow and collect gold silt, there will be no aqueducts to siphon it off to water alfalfa in the desert, there will be no resorts, no jet skis to tear up the banks with wakes. It has never been and thus we cannot tame it. We cannot kill it: it flows still, a mile beneath my back as I consider the night’s Mojave stars.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
After all, you and I, we can’t possibly exist either, eh?
Thank you for this. Very beautiful.
By: By dale on 2007 05 08
Unlike Voltaire, I have not found it necessary to invent a god. But sometimes, where there is no river, it is necessary to invent one.
By: By Maud on 2007 05 08
.
*appreciative sigh*
By: By Rana on 2007 05 08
The most transporting essay I’ve read in ages, Chris.
I’ll be dreaming about that river, I suspect. Beautiful, thank you.
By: By Theriomorph on 2007 05 08
Dorr’s River, like the Styx, Alph and Saraswati, doubtless flows
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
By: By Rob G on 2007 05 08
My - you are wonderfully prolific of late. Thanks so much for that - I love it here!
hugs from PA
connie
By: By connie on 2007 05 08
More appreciativity.
This post sent me off to G**gle Maps to find your outcrop on the satellite photos…not sure I did but the Dome looks very cool from space!
By: By Sven DiMilo on 2007 05 08
so, so beautiful
By: By Stephanie on 2007 05 08
I’ve been scanning the Preliminary geologic map of the East Mojave National Scenic Area, California for limestone outcrops in the vicinity of Cima Dome. Most of them appear to be in the Ivanpah range northeast of the dome. Am I getting warm? I’d love to check these features out (and I’m not a miner). If I find any gold, I’ll share it with you…
By: By Fred Levitan on 2007 05 09
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