The Curse of Pine Grove Mine
September 2020, My best astrophotography photo to date was earned at a dear cost…
I took this at an abandoned mining town in Northern Nevada. What luck for me! No moon, no glow from city lights in the distance… clear skies, perfect conditions. I mean— I planned it that way of course, totally checking astronomic charts for the angle of the Milky Way for that weekend and refusing to make the 500 mile (each way) road trip if my precise meteorological measurements indicated clouds. I turned that old mine upside down, extracting nature’s goodness out of the dark skies instead of the dark caves below. I took many different styles of this composition with the sunken inn playing with the foreground lighting, and even ran around the inside of the structure during the 20 second exposures with a rainbow colored Flowtoy fiber optic whip to make some rather impressive and surreal light painting.
I camped next to about 20 ravers in Joshua Tree once. Really nice people, and I had to get one of those whips after borrowing one for about an hour for these results:
With a happy harvest of photos, and feeling refreshed from a fun weekend of camping with friends, I set out Sunday to get back to San Diego. During the weekend, some of the guys were driving up to the ridge above camp to check out an old west cemetery, but I hadn’t looked yet myself. As my friends left to head back to their respective locations throughout California and Nevada, I hung around the mine to do one quick but thorough tour of it. Here’s a few iPhone photos of the ridge above the mine, and some photos of the mine’s historic buildings.
After admiring the view on the ridge and paying my respects, I went back down for one last tour of the mine buildings and headed out about 30 minutes behind the pace of my friends. That’s when the trouble started. As I drove on the sharp rocky trail out from the mine on the way to the packed dirt “main” road of that desert area, I blew a tire in a very audible way. The tire popped and hissed like a bottle rocket, I could see the condensed misty air escaping the tire and blowing loose dirt next to it. It only took about 3 to 4 minutes for the tire to completely deflate as I made the mad scramble to exit the rocky trail. I made it to the hard packed road, shouted expletives, and laughed hysterically at the situation. I was alone in the desert with a flat tire, a classic movie cliché. I was about done swapping the tire for my donut when the local Game Warden drove up behind me out of the scorched horizon and kindly hung out with me until I had the donut mounted. He tried a repair tool on my tire but it didn’t work. I hobbled out of the desert for about 15 miles into the closest town of Yerington, and spent about two hours chugging Monster Energy trying to repair the tire with a kit I bought at the local O’Reilly. Sadly, the slash in the tire was too serious, and my multiple patch attempts would fail within a quarter mile. I then drove over 40 miles of highway on the failed and flat tire, in the opposite direction of home to get to Gardnersville to buy a new tire from Walmart (only service center open on Sunday for maybe 100 miles). To top it all off, I THEN got pulled over and ticketed by CHP only a few miles back into California for speeding. All the events of the day had put me 5 hours behind schedule of my 12ish hour drive and I was just trying to get home ASAP.
I don’t remember when I got home to San Diego that night, but I think I left camp at 8AM and got home around 11PM.
I get the photos on the computer and at least I’m really happy with them. I edit a few of the really cool milky way photos, then only export the featured photo of this blog to my desktop.
Then things get busy, and I don’t look at the photos again for weeks.
I come back to the computer and I can’t find the raw images. Nowhere. Not in my recycle bin, not on my backup drives. I figure out what the serial numbers of the image files would be and search the entire hard drive for those, and get nothing… nothing but those serial numbers from the previous cycle of 10,000 images I took, (from before the 4 digit image serial numbers restarted) images from back on deployment 5 years prior. All I have, my only piece of photographic evidence from that entire trip [ok besides the iPhone] is this image that I had saved loosey goosey on my desktop so I could email it quickly to my mom or something. The folder the images used to be in is just empty. A ghost town. I even gave those photos to a friend months before, and he looked on his computer, and IT WAS THE SAME THING! An empty folder!
Was this place cursed? Did I anger any spirits there? Why was the journey to the camp so easy, but the way home so perilous? Did I forget to actually take the files off the SD card? Did I edit the images straight from the SD card then format it later?
I would never be that careless. It’s obviously a curse.
So here is my only evidence of those great astrophotography shots that I drove about 24 hours for— and cost me damn near a thousand dollars to deliver to you. Enjoy!
