Daily Dose of the Southwest: Fool’s Gold Mountain

Behold, the Superstition Mountains.

A special kind of magic exists out here — a dark magic. As a land of rugged beauty, every element of it stays ready to hurt you.

Think of it like a maze of snaggle-toothed ridges and brush-choked canyons, set with booby-traps of jumping cactus, rattlesnakes, unstable rocks, and the occasional rude hiker blasting mumble rap on portable speakers.

And so it’s a kind of sick joke that the Legend of the Lost Dutchman lures treasure hunters into this labyrinth. It’s destined to chew them up and spit them out — if they don’t collapse due to dehydration or heat stroke first.

Yet, thousands of people each year, to this day, set out in search of the gold-bearing quartz vein said to belong to Jacob Waltz, the Lost Dutchman. No one has ever found it, however — if it even exists at all.

Geologically, the Superstition Mountains are by-and-large a poor place to find gold, or any other precious minerals for that matter. The magma chamber that once expelled the bristling lava and super-heated ash to make the Superstitions, well — it let go of the vast majority of its gold when it made the Supes’ older neighbor, the Goldfield Mountains.

So while Goldfields were littered with gold and became a decent mining district in the 1890s, the Superstitions have never offered much in mineral wealth.

Therefore, it seems unlikely Waltz would’ve found gold in the Superstitions. It’s not impossible, but unlikely.

And considering that hundreds of thousands of people spanning 100 years have set out into the Supes looking and come up empty, you’re better off appreciating the harsh beauty of this range. Because the only gold you’re going to find is the glimmering golden hour light just before sundown.

A worthy treasure to seek, if you ask me.

-Jake

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