Posted on 04/01/2008 8:39:50 PM PDT by Inyo-Mono
After weeks of speculation in the international media over whether bodies are indeed buried at a former Death Valley hide-out for Charles Manson and his followers, the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department has decided to launch an official investigation.
The Sheriff’s Department will, nevertheless, proceed cautiously. “What we’ve determined after a careful review of all of the recent data that has been provided to us, following those trips out to Barker Ranch by laboratory scientists, professors and some highly-trained search dogs,” Inyo County Sheriff Bill Lutze said, “is that there’s reason enough to look for more scientific indicators of potential burial sites – before leaping ahead to any significant excavations.”...
Ping!
Ping!
I go throughout Inyo and Mono Counties a lot, courtesy of my job at CALTRANS. Would be interesting to see more about this.
I’ll keep you posted.
The site’s south east of the town of Ballarat, which is east of Trona Wildrose Road, if that’s of any use. Probably quite a ways from anything CalTrans handles. It’s off a dirt road in the Panamint Mountains.
The former stomping grounds of one of my favorite characters, a single blanket jackass prospector...
There's a classic Shorty Harris story about the time he was leaving the valley for some ‘single blanket miner's’ confab of some sort and stumbled across a large vein of gold. For a couple of minutes he pondered skipping the event, then decided entertainment trumped mining, so he'd just take some samples and come back later. He could never find the vein again, but the samples he took to town were supposedly the richest samples ever assayed there.
I stumbled across Shorty's story when I was nine years old, read everything I could find about him, then importuned my parents to visit Death Valley on our next vacation. Just another one of those things my folks held against me for the rest of their lives, an overnight in a motel at lovely Death Valley Junction.
Is this a blueprint for a roman-a-clef CSI-Las Vegas show or what?
LOL! I think you nailed it!
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