Every Trail Tells a Story
Contact Mine
Hike a piece of mining history built as solidly as a Scout merit badge.
Mine ruins, ore tracks, and echoes of prospectors’ dreams.
A rugged climb rewarded with sweeping views of Pinto country.
Explore an early 1900s’ silver and gold mine site on a trail leading into rugged terrain near the park’s north entry station. The Contact Mine’s considerable remains include several mine shafts, ore car tracks and a cable winch.
The mine’s layout, equipment, and the road leading to it all suggest some excellent early 20th-century engineering was carefully applied to the endeavor. The access road with its supporting rock foundations and the way it contours over rocky slopes is a particularly good expression of the road-builder’s art. Of course, by the standards of the day, the yield from the Contact Mine was good and the enterprise relatively prosperous, so constructing a good access road to the site made good business sense.
More than a century later, the road to the mine is a trail, winding across steep and stubborn country. Two words of advice: The first stretch of trail is sketchy, and you don’t join the mine road until past the half-mile mark. Also, more than a century of erosion has made this road a rocky one.
From Highway 62 in Twentynine Palms, drive 4 miles south on Utah Trail to an entry kiosk on the national park’s north boundary. Continue another 0.5 mile south to a pullout, parking and information board on the right (west) side of the road.
From the information board, follow the very faint road southwest across flat, sandy, cholla-dotted terrain. After 0.1 mile the trail crosses a low dirt dike and soon reaches a second dike that traces a wash. Follow the wash to the right as it curves toward the mountains.
At 0.4 mile, the wash forks and you bear right, heading toward those rocky mountains. Concentrate on the trail but do look up to admire vistas of the Pinto Mountains and the surrounding parkland. About 0.75 mile of travel from the trailhead brings you to a not-very-obvious junction with another wash. Watch for rock cairns, bear right, climb out of the wash and join the old mining road.
The road ascends rapidly for a mile. Along this steep length, the quality of the road construction is particularly evident. Not long after you spot the first mining equipment, the old road delivers you to the ruins of the Contact Mine.