Camp Bird Mine is a gold, silver & lead complex, but that is all I could find out about it.
My second of several currently planned trips into the central Bradshaws. I had intended to make this a loop with Paxton Place, but the brush was too stabby, so today I took the more direct route to Camp Bird.
From Campbell’s Flat, I headed south in a sandy wash. It was slow going. I got back on Wagoner Rd, until I got to the unnumbered, and rather old, jeep trail which serves as the official TH. Though uphill, it was so slight as to be barely noticeable.
Camp Bird Well was dry and the windmill collapsed. There must be water underground still, though, as the trees by the well provided one of only two brief shady spots on an otherwise very exposed hike. The nearby cabin was still standing, but half roofless. It was filled with animal poo and graffiti, the most recent of which was 1990. I got a start when I saw hives on the ceiling 
, but thankfully they were as abandoned as the cabin. 
I found adit #1 easily enough, but it was too collapsed to do anything more than stick my camera in for a random photo. Adit #2 took a bit of wandering to find, and while it had a decent opening, the opening was at the bottom of a loose 7 ft. high pile of over burden. I did not want to risk climbing down even to poke my camera in the opening. I found a fair amount of piping down-wash, some of which more resembled tin chimney pipe than iron liquid bearing pipe.
While searching for an unnamed spring in a nearby wash, I found two more adits, neither of which are marked on the topo. I thought at first adit #3 was a cave, but upon crawling in, saw that it had timbers bracing a collapsed opening. A few yards away, adit #4 was barely recognizable: Hidden by dense brush, no opening remained, only timbers in the familiar bracing position. (The spring was dry.) This area was the only other shady area on the hike.
I started working my way down wash towards Ridges Spring, but it started getting brushy, so I opted instead for side-sloping the spur on the north bank. It was fairly smooth sailing, and I found a saddle which would make for a relatively unstabby crossing to Paxton Place, as I originally intended two months ago. When I got close to Ridges Spring, I could see the trail out the back/east side, so I crossed over.
Rather than take FR 9244B (which had recently been scraped) back to Campell’s Flat, as I had previously, I instead turned down an unmarked jeep / cattle trail to a large black tank. I had hoped it would provide some shade, but no such luck. (It was 82° when I started at 0830, but had since warmed up to 99°. )
GPS File: Camp_Bird_Mine
Distance: 5.98 mi.
AEG: 802 ft.
Time: 3h 01m
Hike Video
Camp Bird Mine, Bradshaw Mountains from Preston McMurry on Vimeo.
