McNitt Road Loop

This is an old morning-ride chestnut. It's quick loop with a bit of climb, a bit of dirt, a lot of deer. Only 10 miles. And a kickin' view.

Easter Sunday Mine

I've been wanting to check out the Easter Sunday mine for a month or so.

The ~1930's (?) map shows that there was a small mining camp way up in the middle of the woods. Each little square on the map was a structure of some sort -- I'm assuming a place where people lived or perhaps worked.

But if there's a dot that made it to that map, then there was something there in 1930's, which is sort of interesting since according to the report, The Ore Deposits of Northeastern Washington (published 1914), the mine was pretty much done by 1909... kinda makes you wonder what the hey was going on nearly 20 years later up in these structures.

I took Monday off to go check this out. I invited Thomas to go with me. He's the dude in the first pic. As it works, I converged with Thomas online via Instagram. Sometime in the last year, he went to get some work done by Glen, who vetted him and proclaimed him, "a good guy... I really like him." Thomas' Instagram account shows a dude who likes to explore. He's got Mondays off. And I prefer company when bushwhacking deep in the NF. So it was a go.

With Caltopo, I traced the old route from the 30's map into a GPS track and dumped it on my GPS.

According to the FS 2016 map, the old road is long gone. As it turns out, that's only partially true. In real life, the final 1/2 mile or so was actually spot on the red line. And the mapset I was using on my GPS unit was also in error with that fact. Additionally, the road numbers on both newer map sets didn't correspond to the real world in a couple cases. This is a good reminder to have a bunch of map options when playing around in these areas.

You can see all the potential roads in the map shot above there.

Worse pic of all time --especially given the horrific reality of what was way way down that hole: turbid, yellow water and a tunnel that goes surely goes straight into hell.

There's a lot to explore here, and none of the dots on my 30's map lined up with the single miner's cabin that we did find, but the mine detritus was definitely in the right spot. My thinking here is that by spending a bunch of time exploring this area, I'll for sure bump into many unmarked treasures.

This mine was only about 16 miles from our house, the transport stage is a pretty mellow 10 mile paved journey through beautiful farm and forest. Then NF opens up -- we rode about 6 miles of forest road (~ 4 gravel/nice and ~2 proper/gnarly) to get to this mine. We saw a very promising closed off road that requires exploring. I'll be heading back.