THE BIRTHDAY HIKES - 2

Year One

Yes, this was the beginning.  Of course I don't remember much about the first few years, but I sure was cute wasn't I?

January 4, 2014

Today’s Hike:                     4 miles
Total Miles:                        8 miles
Total Dog Sniff:                  4 miles 

New Years Resolutions?  Humbug; but more about that at another time.

The hike for today would be Silly Mountain again.  Why? Well for one thing it’s close and that’s always a plus.  Secondly, it can be challenging, and third, I most always manage to meet some interesting people on the trails and have a good time. Today was no different. 

 I was hiking along the Superstition View Trail, on my way back to the parking lot when I saw a family of seven heading down the Huff and Puff Trail towards a junction just in front of me.  When we met I stopped and waited for them to pass by.  There was mom and dad, carrying a little one, two sisters about 10 to 12 were in front of them, and running in the lead were two boys about 8 and 10 years old.  I pulled over to let the two boys go ahead.

We hiked about a hundred yards and the dad told the boys to step off the trail and let me and another hiker pass by.  We passed by and the family started up again in tow.  After another hundred yards, the two boys were gaining and so I stepped off the trail and let them go by.  Twenty more feet and they began to fade and dad told them to step off the trail again.  I passed by, went another twenty feet and told them they could go ahead.  Within the next twenty feet we jockeyed back and forth in a little game.

After walking with them for a while I asked the boys where they were from.  “Arizona” the older boy said while the younger one was a bit more exact, “We live right between the United States and Mexico”.  “Wow”! I exclaimed.  “Do you live in a houseboat?”  “A houseboat, what’s that”?  I told him that I was from Seattle, WA and some people on Lake Union lived in big boats that looked like houses. “Cool” said the little guy.  

“We’ve been to Seattle” chimed in the ten year old.  “We were up there panning for gold.  My dad has a bottle full of gold”.  Gold, I thought?  This calls for a story, so I proceeded to tell them the story of how we found some gold on our trip to Alaska. (See AN ALASKAN ADVENTURE on this blog.  It would make a good read).

 As I reached the end of the story I looked around and saw mom and dad intently listening, and when one of the boys asked if he could see some of the gold, I had to tell them that the story wasn’t all true.  “However, this story is true”; and I proceeded to tell them about old Jacob Waltz and the Lost Dutchman gold.

Jacob Waltz was a gold hunter who lived in Phoenix, AZ.  Every November he would pack up his mule and head out into the Superstition Mountains, returning around the middle of March with a bag of gold nuggets.  After a few years this attracted the attention of other gold hunters and they would try to follow Jacob into the mountains to discover where his mine was.  But Jacob was a cagy old man and would manage to elude them every time.

When Jacob Waltz died, they found a box of gold nuggets under his bed along with a map telling where the mine was.  The map wasn’t exact, but did show some of the main topographical features, such as a rock formation known as Weavers Needle, an old stone house, some trails leading up a box canyon, a black top mesa, and some other vague clues.

For years people have searched for the mine, but nothing has been found.  It is believed that rather than a mine, it was a cache of gold.  In the early 1800’s the Peralta family would come up from Mexico to mine gold from the mountains of Arizona.  They would spend the winter mining and then come spring they would load their pack horses with the gold ore and head back to Mexico.  In 1848 the US-Mexico border was going to be revised to be the Rio Grande River.  This would mean that the Peralta gold fields would now belong to the United States.  In one last mining expedition the Peralta family spent the winter trying to clean up their mining operations in the Arizona before the border change became official.  They had loaded up the pack horses with gold ore and were heading back to Mexico when they were attacked by a band of renegade Apache Indians.  The Indians chased the miners west against the cliffs of the Superstition Mountain, to an area now known as Massacre Grounds.  The name explains what happened and the Indians took all of the Mexicans gold.  It is believed that they hid the saddle bags of gold somewhere nearby in the Superstitions.  One of these caches is where it is believed that Jacob Waltz was getting his gold.  

About this time we had reached the parking lot and I looked around at the wide eyed boys, along with their two sisters, mom and dad.  “True story” I told them. Can I Google it and find the map asked the youngest?  Lost Dutchman gold” I told him, and then I bid them good day.

I do believe we may have added some new Dutch hunters to the list.

Well I gotta go now, see you along the trail.