Clay and I decided to try to retrace the footsteps of those 4 adventurers and see if we couldn’t find a piece of that rich float laying around somewhere along the way. The full story of that trip can be found at: http://www.desertusa.com/mag07/april07/lostgold.html, and a followup story (JENKINS' LOST LODE ~ The Rest of the Story) to that one in this Sub-Sub Forum at: http://www.desertusa.com/mb3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=397
This trip resulted in me seeing so many interesting things that I returned to the area alone many times in the years that followed to investigate them all.
One of the things I had seen and photographed was a fairly large cave which was filled with water several feet deep. I never thought much more about that cave until 6-23-09 when Salvador Delagadillo and I were going through some photos on my computer and I came across the one shown below.
Salvador couldn’t believe there was anything like that in LaBarge canyon and he had never seen it before. He insisted on seeing it. So on the morning of 6-24-09 we parked at the Marina at Canyon Lake and started hiking to it. We made several wrong turns and got into some God-Awful country due to my imperfect memory about the exact location of the cave.
We finally arrived there around 11:00AM. There was less water in the cave than when I had seen it before and it was a little bit of a letdown for both of us. But unknown to us at that time, the best was yet to come. We settled ourselves into shady spots at the entrance to the cave and dug into our backpacks for cold drinks and ham sandwiches we had brought along for lunch. As we sat there eating the sandwiches, Sal noticed the sun was just starting to come through an opening at the top of the cave. It came down at an angle and struck the surface of the water in a back corner of the cave. He sat there watching that sunspot on the water, fascinated by the reflection it was just beginning to project up on the wall of the cave.
The longer we sat there the larger the sunspot got and the larger the reflection on the wall of the cave got. By the time we finished our lunch the reflection on the wall was almost three feet across, and so focused that we could ripples in the water in the reflected image on the wall.
By now it was after 12 Noon and although it felt nice in the cave the temperature was rising fast out in the open. I suggested to Sal that we pack up and head for the truck before it got any hotter. “No! No!” Was his response. “This EEES too boootiful to leave!” I could see that I would not be able to drag him away from that reflection on the wall until the show was over, so I made myself comfortable in the sand and stretched out for a nap using my backpack for a pillow.
Gypsy (My 120 pound rottweiler) laid down beside me and put her fat heavy head on my lap for a pillow. Every now and then I would open one eye just a crack and see Sal sitting there silently, staring at the dancing image on the wall. After about 15 minutes without dropping off into my nap, I decided I needed a cigarette. I sat up and asked Sal if he had seen enough yet? “No! No!” was his response again. “EEEEET is not OWER yet, there EEEES STEEL mucho more to go” I sat there puffing on my cigarette as I stared at the wall, and told him that it reminded me of something. “OH YES!” he said. “EEEET looks like doorway to another deemishon, like we could walk right through EEEET and come out someplace else”. He was right!! That was exactly what I was trying to think of as a description of what I was looking at, now almost Six feet across and Four feet high..
I was never able to get him to leave that cave until the sun had moved so high in the sky that the sunspot was hitting the sandy floor part of the cave, and his doorway to another dimension on the wall had completely closed up and disappeared. The look on his face was one you would expect to see if he had actually been in another dimension and just returned.
The link below, will take you to a streaming video of the cave and reflected image on the wall.
http://i212.photobucket.com/player.swf? ... ave/sc.flv
