Time Running Out for Old Prospector’s Desert Mining Camp

For more than 50 years Walter Bickel has lived in a cabin on a remote gold-mining claim in the Mojave Desert’s rugged Last Chance Canyon without running water, plumbing or electricity.

There, in “Bickel Camp,” amid a collection of old mining equipment, junked cars, worn furniture and mineral samples, the 83-year-old prospector learned to solve most problems with his bare hands.

Out of scrap metal, wire and wood, he built hole diggers, sluice boxes, rock crushers and rainwater collection systems. In a cluttered toolshed, Bickel even fashioned spare car parts for the dozens of visitors who each year ventured into the canyon to hear his stories about Indians, plants, animals and gold over a bowl of “Last Chance Canyon Stew.”

Now, the tall, white-bearded miner’s life style in the wilderness is being threatened by the Bureau of Land Management, which determined in July that he has been “trespassing” on public lands and that his campsite may have to be destroyed.

“I don’t know what to do,” confessed Bickel from a hospital bed in a Ridgecrest nursing home, where he is recovering from a mild stroke suffered a few hours before bureau rangers inspected his campsite on Sept. 2. “I’m being pushed around by higher-ups.”

Staring at the white wall in front of his hospital bed, Bickel recalled a dream that has haunted him ever since his trouble with the bureau began. “I’m out prospectin,’ ” he said, “and I see big pockets of gold in a hole but my arms aren’t long enough to reach ‘em.”

Bickel’s many supporters across the state have responded to the bureau’s charges by launching a campaign to preserve the camp, which they call a “national treasure,” and give Bickel a chance to return there someday to live out the remainder of his life.

“I can’t think of anywhere else that you can see the history of mining in the 1930s as well preserved as you can at Bickel Camp,” said Patricia Farris, who owns a small newspaper in Ridgecrest called the News-Review. Beyond that, she said, “Mr. Bickel is not your typical smelly, crusty miner--he is a gentleman, a scholar, an inventor and a sage.”

Candy Johnson, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management’s regional headquarters in Riverside, sees the issue another way.

“I think he’s got a tremendous collection of junk out there,” Johnson said. “The point is that he doesn’t have a right to have it there.”

Johnson said Bickel is one of more than 200 people in Southern California who are thought to be living on public land without proper permits. She said many of these “trespassers” are miners like Bickel who have failed to file required plans of operation with Land Management authorities and cannot prove that their production justifies residence on a mining claim.

“The only structures you may put on a claim are structures used in the production of your mine,” Johnson said. “Bickel has never filed a plan of operations and he has a house and everything on God’s green Earth out there.”

Until this year, Johnson said, the Bureau of Land Management lacked the funds and manpower to enforce land-use regulations on the 15 million acres of California desert it manages. “This year we got more money,” she said, “and 20 new rangers.”

Former bureau archeologist Jan Lawson argued that the agency should make an exception in Bickel’s case and is completing documentation to nominate Bickel Camp as a historic resource for the National Register of Historic Places. Failing that, an alternative plan would have the campsite moved to the Maturango Museum in downtown Ridgecrest, about 20 miles north of Last Chance Canyon.

“Ideally, I would like to have the cabin preserved in the canyon so that Walt could at least visit it on weekends,” Lawson said. “Right now, we are worried that it will be destroyed by vandals.”

Needs to Be Cared For

If nothing else, Bickel, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease and a back problem that may make it impossible for him to actively mine again, said he also hopes that the camp “stays where it is, like a safe child.”

Bickel was born in the farming town of Beloit, Kan., on Aug. 3, 1905. As a young man, he bought a popcorn machine and traveled with a carnival throughout the Midwest.

He moved to Los Angeles in the late 1920s, where he married, fathered seven children and ran a machine shop that went bust during the Depression. In 1933, he decided to seek his fortune in the California desert as a gold miner.

In 1934, Bickel rumbled into Last Chance Canyon in a Model-T Ford and staked a claim among the red, white, green and purple hills that hinted of mineralization typical of gold-bearing earth.

Panned Some Gold

“It was the first place I panned enough gold to think there might be more,” said Bickel, who fell into a daily routine that lasted more than 50 years. Life in the desert was too much for his wife, and they divorced in 1940.

Each morning, he prepared his usual breakfast of “mush, bacon and strong coffee” before heading out to dig until sundown. After eating a dinner of stew seasoned with edible herbs and plants found in the canyon, Bickel played harmonica beside a campfire or studied the stars with an old telescope.

“There wasn’t no loneliness at the camp,” Bickel recalled. “There’s always something to do.”

People Showed Up

The advent of air-conditioning, four-wheel-drive vehicles and paved roads brought increasing numbers of venturesome city dwellers to the area on weekends. For these visitors, Bickel Camp became a favorite place to rest their dusty boots and learn some lessons about mining in the days of old.

Among his “students” was Orange County junior high school teacher William Gann, 42, who first met the miner in 1968.

“We saw him as a patriarch, a third grandfather, who lived in a place where life was cut down to the basics,” Gann said. “He cooked beans and bacon and spareribs cooked over creosote bush--meals that put a spice in our souls that will last a lifetime.”

A final determination on the fate of Bickel Camp is expected within a month, Bureau of Land Management officials said. Meanwhile, the miner hopes for the best.

“I wish I was sittin’ out there right now, maybe shovelin’ some dirt,” said Bickel, as he struggled to sit up in his bed. “But when I shut my eyes, I imagine I’m prospectin’ again, examinin’ rocks.”