Desert Queen Mine

April 24, 2018 tarannosaurus

Epic Travel → North America → The West Coast → Southern California → South Central Desert → Joshua Tree → Desert Queen Mine

Location: Eastern Park Blvd area, Joshua Tree

Time Required: 1 – 2 hours (depending on how much exploring in the mining ruins you do)

Distance: ~1.5 miles

Elevation Gain/Loss: 150 feet

Red Tape/Notes: Entrance fee is $25 per vehicle and the park is open 24 hours. For more information on the park, visit the Joshua Tree NPS website. For more details on the trail, hikespeak has a nice post. For beta on available climbing sites and routes, Mountain Project has an extensive list and lots of details, and you could also try The Crag.

What’s Nearby?: Hidden Valley, Skull Rock, Eagle Cliff Miner’s Cabin, Willow Hole

The Desert Queen Mine was a successful enough gold mine to remain in operation for 75 years, despite never being wildly productive. Nearly 20 shafts remain from the original mine, although all of them are gated/closed off. You can hike from the parking area 0.3 miles to a lookout, and you’ll pass by some neat ruins along the way, or you can hang a right just after the ruins (around 0.1 miles) and head over to the mine site itself. There’s also a use trail running down from the lookout to the canyon, and from there you can make your way up to the mine. Visiting the mine site is the highlight of this hike, in our opinion, and you can explore around the area as much as you’d like. There are mine shafts and things to see all the way up the trail – it’s also worth poking around in the wash below the mine, where there are some mining artifacts and other mine shafts. From the trail, which is an old mining road cutting diagonally up the canyon face, it’s fairly obvious when you’ve reached the summit, and although there are some trails that continue on, this is the end of the Desert Queen Mine area. There are a few climbs in the area, all located south and southeast of the mine.