West side of the Bullfrog District

By Denis & Sandi Inman

We left the Candy Store in Beatty at 7:00 AM and drove to the Goldwell Open Air Museum to air down. From there we traveled West to Cave Rock Spring for a quick break. Continuing on, our efficient group of explorers consisting of Jeremy riding with me, Jim and Vic persevered to get a few miles of trail behind us before sundown. After another short stop at McDonald Spring, we found a dead end trail to cross off our list of places to investigate in the future.

Once the Jeeps got turned around, we were soon headed North along the old Bullfrog Beatty Railroad grade for Currie Spring. Just past the spring, we angled to the Northwest to catch the trail West into Brier Spring Canyon. The aerial entertainment was courtesy of our US Military, probably some fighter jets out of China Lake NAS. We had lunch at Brier Spring, the former site of Strozzi Ranch. Our next destination was Phinney Canyon and we were stifled again at about 6500′ in elevation by snow on the road, just as we were last year. We will get to the end of the trail some day.

Our economical trio of Jeeps took a slightly different route back to Beatty and came across some new trails to scrutinize on a later run. Burros in Beatty? As you might expect, we ran across a couple of herds of donkeys on the way to Rhyolite where the group aired back up and head for home. We arrived back in Pahrump at about 3:30 after a long day of scrutinizing an historic portion of our local desert.