Mollie Gibson Canyon/Mine - White Mts., Mono County, California

[David A. Wright]

Completed a new 4x4 Trail page on my website. It is about the Mollie Gibson Canyon / Mine, which is outlined in Roger Mitchell's INYO-MONO SUV TRAILS book, starting on page 171.

Not much is known about the mine, but it's fun exploring it and the site of the mine camp. The trail is short and sweet, but does have it's beauty and interesting tidbits.

My page can be found HERE.

David A. Wright
Great Basin Research
"Happy Trails to You, Until We Meet Again" - Roy Rogers and Dale Evans

[JackSilb]

David,

As usual, very nice work.

If you don't mind answering these questions:
Where do you research about these places?
How long take you on the search?
Preparing the report?

Thank you!
-JACK


So much to see, so little time. Try using your 4WD tosee and do more.
Tread Lightly! empowers generations to enjoy the outdoors responsibly...
http://www.4wdtrips.net

[David A. Wright]

Question: "Where do you research about these places?"

They either are pages I've readin Roger Mitchell's SUV Trails series, or places I've gone on my own exploring.

Question: "How long take you on the search?"

Not sure what you are referring to. The actual drive? Researching to write the report? Depends. Most of the routes in my 4x4 trails series are routes I've taken many times in the past, some only once (the Mollie Gibson page was written a couple days after I took the road for the first and only time). Since gas prices went sky high, I've stopped going far and wide like I've done in the past and have concentrated on many of those roads that are in my backyard. You know, those you've seen many times and think to yourself "one day I'll try that road." Well, I've been taking many of these lately and I've written on them or plan to. As for historical research, such as on my Swansea page, it's all stuff that I've done in years past for other projects, so the information is there on my computer's hard drive and I simply come up with a way to use it.

Question: "Preparing the report?"

Depends. On some, such as my Glacier View page, it took three or four fulldays to write it up, proofread, make changes, prepare the photos and upload it all up to my site at dial up speeds. The Champion Sparkplug Mine page probably took closer to a week working on it most each day. When I get to working on a page and I'm not workingin my employmentthat day, I might spend six hours or moreper dayat the computer working on it.

Probably the most tedious and time consumingare the photos. Taking a 3.1 megapixel photo, reducing them to a 640x480 image, preparing them in Photoshop (putting in my copywrite wording, placing the borders), creating thumbnails (I use IrfanView to reduce the photos - that simple program seems to make the smallest file sizes), then hyperlinking the thumbnails to the larger versions of the photos. As for the Spark Plug Mine page, I also had to take photographs of my old 35mm prints (I don't have a scanner). I did that crudely - hand holding my digital camera above the original 35mm print laying angled on my workshop bench, using a cutting board to lay the print against, using the digital camera's close-up setting. I didn't use a tripod, as it's buried in a storage shed and I didn't want to take the time. I've gotten fairly good at taking adequate images this way. Since the images will be small anyway, flaws don't show up well and can usually be Photoshopped out.

On my older trail pages, I didn't use thumbnails. However, earlier this year I was using so much bandwidth that it took down my host site several times (http://www.death-valley.us/), so I went to the thumbnail so that all those photos isn't taking up so much bandwidth. I was using 30 gigabytes and more per month at its peak early last summer.

As to writing the page, it depends on how much detail I put into it. I generally carry and use a microcassette recorder and transcribe my verbal notes. These are place into a Microsoft Word file, a file for each year. I've been doing this since about 1990. These files include transcripts from trips, researching for my writing projects (newspaper research, courthouse records, etcetera), and my observations from day to day. Many of my annual files run 500+ pages of notes. When I'm preparing the trail pages, I check all my notes from previous trips on a particular trail, in which I've noted mileage, trail details, etcetera.

Many people have Mitchell's books and use them in their own exploration. However, I like to expand on Mitchell's route descriptions and enhance with plenty of photos so that people can make their own decisions about the trail. And with my webpage I can keep the information relatively current, unlike Mitchell can with published books.

David A. Wright
Great Basin Research
"Happy Trails to You, Until We Meet Again" - Roy Rogers and Dale Evans