GOLD MINE TOUR ~ February 11, 2007

Located 2½ miles east of Oatman, AZ on Historic Route 66, the Gold Road Mine offers tours to the public. It’s open daily from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. We were there bright and early on a Sunday morning for the first tour of the day. We were the only ones there at that time, too, which was great because our family had the tour all to ourselves and it was like we had our own personal tour guide. He was a great guy, too, and we gave him a tip afterwards which he obviously appreciated. The basic one-hour tour is $12 for adults and $6 for kids 12 and under. Group rates are also available at $11.00 per person for groups of 10 or more.

The Mine Tour is a walking tour, but transportation is available for the physically challenged. First, you will meet a nice lady in the main office. You are required to wear a hard hat and sign a liability waiver. Have your kids go to the bathroom there before you head up to the mine. For the tour, you will be transported in a tractor-like vehicle up to the mine entrance. The guide will take you into the mine approximately one-eighth of a mile. The mine is well-lit and there is safety fencing blocking off certain areas. You are invited to bring along your camera or camcorder and take as many shots as you please.

Going into a real underground gold mine was an exciting experience, and the tour guide was interesting and informative. He helped us to imagine what it must have been like in the old mining days. He shows you side shafts, mine cars, an elevator, a “widow maker” drill and other equipment that they used. At one point you can gaze down into a 1,400 ft. deep dark pit, but the wire fence was bowed out from people leaning on it to get a good look, so you wouldn’t catch me getting too close! About half way through the tour you will be standing directly under Route 66, which is a good picture-taking spot. Then the guide takes you into the original “Glory Hole” where you can see the gold-filled quartz veins. We even got to see a real tectonic plate that was exposed and lines one side of a shaft – it looks like a large flat smooth slab of rock.

Hard-rock miners worked three shifts a day, drilling, blasting, and hauling. Then the ore would be soaked in cyanide to extract the gold. Some quartz veins contain a higher percentage of gold than others, and the lesser quality veins are left in place because it’s just not worth the trouble to dig them out for such a low concentration of the yellow metal. At the end of the tour they let us take a bunch of ore samples home – which in itself was worth the price of the tour for us rock hounds!

It was in 1900 when a Mexican prospector named Jose Jerez was out searching for his lost burros. He stumbled over a chunk of quartz that glistened brightly in the midday sun. Upon examining the rock, Jose saw that it contained some gold. He took it in to have it assayed and it came out to 40 ounces per ton. Some investors purchased his claim, which then changed hands several times. By the end of 1907, the Gold Road Mine had reportedly produced 140,625 ounces of gold worth $2,250,000.00. Since then, the Gold Road Mine has been in production on and off now for about a hundred years.

During World War II, the government needed other metal types for the war effort, so the miners were taken to other areas and the Oatman mines were closed. The Gold Road Mine was re-opened in 1995 and it produced about 40,000 ounces of gold annually until the market price of gold dropped in 1998. Production costs alone were $271 per ounce, so most of the workers were laid off and moved away while the gold in the mine awaited a better day. A few employees stayed behind to provide these great mine tours. We were told that the mining company recently invested in some new equipment and may be getting ready to gear up production again once the gold price is right.

Visit www.goldroadmine.com for details on the Gold Road mine tour. Also click on “Mine Safety” for important information about the hazards of abandoned mines – a must-read if you plan on exploring the area. Curiosity can be deadly when it comes to old mines. So if you’re tempted to venture into a real gold mine, do it safely and enjoy this exciting guided tour.

A HAUNTED HOTEL AND A MYSTERIOUS CAR ~ February 11, 2007

The Oatman Hotel is listed on the National Registry of Historic Buildings. It has 10 rooms and is the only two-story adobe building in Mohave County. The Gable/Lombard Honeymoon Suite has been refurbished to the period when Clark Gable and Carol Lombard stayed there. The legendary Hollywood couple often returned to the place where they spent their wedding night in 1939. It is said that guests and staff can sometimes still hear the pair whispering and laughing in that room.

The ghost of “Oatie,” an Irish miner, is also said to haunt one of the guest rooms. One time a professional photographer took a picture of the empty room, and a ghostly figure appeared in the developed print. We were able to peek inside those two rooms, but most of the others were closed. The rooms were small, the bathrooms were down the hall, the furnishings were antique, and the floor was creaky, but we didn’t sense anything spooky. Quite the opposite, it seemed pleasant and I kept thinking how the place must have been pretty lovely and lively in its former life.



Although we didn’t see any ghosts, a strange thing happened to us while we were in Oatman. There was an old car – an Edsel I think – painted primer gray with whitewall tires and a historic vehicle plate. That car seemed to appear and re-appear everywhere we were. We were joking amongst ourselves saying that it must be the phantom car of Oatman or something. The driver always stayed inside the vehicle and all I could see was a shadowy figure dressed in black. Later on at home when I was telling my mom that story, she suggested the possibility that he may have been stalking us. So that got me to wondering, and gave me a creepy feeling when I started thinking about it.


Since we had camped in the area overnight, we arrived in Oatman way early in the morning before the shops were open, so it was kind of neat that we had the place all to ourselves before the tourist crowd arrived. We walked up and down Main Street, then visited the hotel. The first time we saw this unusual car, it was parked off to the side at the top of the street. Then when we were standing in front of the hotel, I asked Rich if he could walk down the street a ways to take a picture. The minute Rich walked away, that car started up, made a u-turn, and pulled up right next to our three boys. I was standing on the other side of a big post so I still didn’t see the driver. Rich had snapped a quick picture and came running back so he wasn’t gone very long and we walked away.



Soon after that, we got in our car and left Oatman, but we decided to stop at a gold mine on the outskirts of town. Oatman is located on a desolate mountainous part of old Route 66, and after leaving town the road starts winding up the mountainside. When I looked back to see Oatman one more time, I noticed that the old car was also leaving town in the same direction that we were going. Well, we decided to stop at a gold mine on the outskirts of Oatman, and when we were stopped at the gold mine I saw that car going up the mountain road past us. So it should have been long gone by the time we got out of the one hour gold mine tour, right? Well, after the tour we got back on the road, continued on up the mountain, came around a corner, and there it was! It was parked up at the top of the hill above the mine, as if waiting and watching for someone (us?) to come by.

Now that was uncannily reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s “Duel” thriller starring Dennis Weaver. In that movie, a mysterious truck with an unseen driver kept following him and trying to run him off the road, which was in a desert canyon country just like this. I kept watching for that car the rest of the day expecting it to turn up again somewhere, but once we left the Oatman area I never saw it anymore. It did show up in one of the photos that we took, though! Hmm, I think that scenario would make for a good imaginative story starter.

Bu the way, the road from Oatman to Kingman is steep and narrow with several sharp hairpin curves, not suitable for vehicles over forty feet in length. The road to Oatman from Topock is not nearly as steep and doesn’t seem like it would be as dangerous, although we saw more roadside crosses between Topock-Oatman than we did on the Oatman-Kingman road. Please drive carefully!


http://www.oatmangoldroad.com - Oatman-Gold Road Chamber of Commerce

OATMAN ~ February 11, 2007

Oatman is an authentic western town of the style that is often copied by movie studios – a row of buildings on each side of a main street lined with wooden sidewalks. The town was named in honor of Olive Oatman, a girl who was kidnapped by Apaches after they massacred her family. The Apaches sold her to the Mojave tribe, where Olive lived for several years until she was rescued in 1857 near the site of the town. In its heyday from the early 1900’s to the 1940’s, Oatman was the largest producer of gold in Arizona, and once was home to thousands of residents. In 1930 the town boasted two banks, seven hotels, ten stores, and twenty saloons.


Route 66 had been built in the 1920’s, and after the mines closed down the town hung on, catering to the many travelers on the road. At first those old Ford Model A’s and Model T’s had to make the treacherous climb up Sitgreaves Pass and down several hairpin curves to Oatman. But in 1952, Route 66 was shifted to an easier more southerly route which bypassed Oatman and went through Yucca so cars could avoid the steep, narrow mountain road. Then when Route 66 was replaced with the I-40 interstate, Oatman suffered a final devastating blow. Today it supports only about 100 people year-round. Oatman is now a tourist town with gift shops and restaurants, since the historic Route 66 has became a popular destination for travelers from all over the world.


For years we’ve heard about the wild burros roaming the streets of Oatman but we didn’t see any when we were there! Apparently they had been there recently, though, because we had to watch where we were walking so we didn’t step in anything. In the afternoon there are supposed to be shootouts between costumed gunfighters in the middle of the main street, but we were there first thing in the morning so we didn’t see them either. Even so, it was well worth the visit to this photogenic old town and we got to go inside the “haunted” Oatman Hotel.