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azdave35,
Something interesting about that area.
The area circled by Doc4261 is up at the top of Squaw Canyon, actually the correct name is New Squaw Canyon. The real Squaw Canyon, or Old Squaw Canyon, is one canyon to the south. When the Forest Service gave information for the updated topo maps someone who didn’t know which canyon was which marked the wrong one and today everyone recognizes it as Squaw Canyon. Old timers however still refer to the canyon to the South as Squaw Canyon and it causes confusion with the younger crowd. There are numerous errors of misnamed canyons and sites by the Forest Service on today’s topo maps all over the Superstitions.
There was an old trail coming up out of LaBarge Canyon at Marsh Valley that followed up (New) Squaw Canyon. That trail is impassable today due to erosion and Crazy Jake using dynamite on it. If you followed that trail all the way to the top you would be standing at the northwest end of the area Doc4261 circled. That circled area is a fault, the north side being the hanging wall and the south side the footwall. I’ve been in that area many times. Walter Gassler’s camp in the grove of Laural trees was just to the east of that circled area about 1000 feet away and John and Joe Kochera found their rotted leather sack of gold ore just to the southeast of the circled area.
Walter Gassler showed me an old mine / hole in the ground over by that circled area. He was afraid to go down in it and when I saw it I could see why. The entrance was a down shaft in solid rock. You could stand on a small ledge about 6-7 feet down but the ledge was slanted and not very big and was dangerous. From that ledge you could look down but couldn’t see the bottom because the shaft angled off to the north a little. It was hard to judge how deep the shaft was from the ledge but it was between 70-90 feet.
Ropes would be a must for going down and it would be a three man endeavor at the very least. Two men above and one going down. After Walter died I forgot about it until one day I was on Peters Mesa with a friend from San Carlos and we got to talking and I told him about Walter’s mine / hole in the ground over there and asked if he knew anything about it. He did know about it and warned me about going in and then proceeded to tell me a pretty hair raising story about it.
The next day we went over to the hole and I let him lead the way to make sure we were talking about the same place. He made a bee line right for it and never wavered or seemed not to know where he was going.
Years later Greg Davis was with me and I showed it to him. Greg said one day he would like to go down and explore it. I gave Greg the same warning my friend gave me and said it was best to just leave it alone. Sometime after that I learned Greg and Jack Carlson were out there and Jack attempted to go down but got only as far as the ledge. With a light he could not see the bottom and bees had made a home down in the shaft somewhere. I was relieved Greg and Jack had not attempted to go in. According to my friend from San Carlos, whoever goes in, never comes back out and there is something terrifying at the bottom.
Matthew
