BACK ROAD ADVENTURE

Huge Rock Murals and 100-Mile Views Highlight This Cerbat Mountain Drive

The road up the Cerbat Mountains doesn't look like much today, but once millions of dollars in silver pay dirt traveled over it. Miners trod in its dust, heading for the Saturday night dances in the boomtown of Chloride, 20 miles north of Kingman. Now the road is almost as busted as the boom. Tailings fan down from a dozen hillside mines silent for more than 50 years. Passable only with fourwheel-drive, high-clearance vehicles, the road up the Cerbats appeals to adventurers interested in Arizona's early mining history.

Under high clouds, our threevehicle caravan rolled down old Tennessee Avenue through Chloride, a partially resuscitated ghost town. The road turns south past the inactive Tennessee-Schuylkill mine, whose 1,400-foot-deep shaft yielded $7.5 million in gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc. Water now floods the mine to the 600-foot level.

For better rear-wheel traction up the 7-mile-long grade, I loaded 200 pounds of rocks into the bed of my 1995 Toyota pickup. Jim Milner, 55, a retired Arizona Highway patrolman from Kingman, led in a 1995 Jeep. Backcountry roads are his passion.

I trailed Phoenix photogra-pher Chuck Lawsen, who was driving a 1993 Toyota pickup. Lawsen once led me into a can-yon so deep I doubted I would ever get my truck out. Seeking reassurance today, I asked, "You sure this road is good?" I had been scared silly on the other trip. "Good all the way up," he promised.

Beginning at 4,000 feet ele-vation in high desert, the public road climbs through junipers and chaparral to 6,000 feet,through a crazy quilt of federal land and old claims, before joining a graded 12mile road that runs along the spine of the Cerbats and snakes north-northwest down Big Wash to U.S. Route 93. The route forms a 22-mile loop back to Chloride.

Sedans can negotiate the first mile and a half - un-til the huge, fanciful psych-edelic murals painted in vivid colors by artist Roy E. Purcell between 1966 and 1975 on the chocolate-colored rocks. From there, the road halves in width and sprouts boulders. We shift-ed into low gear for the crawl around hairpin curves.

At about 1.7 miles from Chloride we came to the Falls, a granite slab coated with a distinctive whitewash of min-erals by spring runoffs. At its base, a seep dripped from rusty pipes. It's never wise to drink from springs in hard-rock min-ing country, where water may contain dangerous heavy met-als such as lead.

At 1.9 miles, we ventured upon a rotting tipple once used to separate ore, plus some grayblack tailings and two horizontal shafts shut by dynamite. One of the collapsed shafts seeped water steadily.

Before tackling the road, we had stopped at the Mohave Museum of History and Art in Kingman to examine old mining maps and newspaper clippings. In its heyday, around 1916, the Chloride district mines employed 2,000 miners to blast silver, lead, zinc, (BELOW LEFT) Our adventurers travel a gentler section of the road.

copper and even a little gold out of rich lodes.

Jeffrey Jarrell, 42, of Chloride, a construction worker who collects mineral samples as a hobby, told us most local mines are wet, with lots of gas, and have rotten timbers. "For the most part," he added, "what you see on the dump is what's in the mine.

"Mohave County has some real good gold" but not around Chloride, he explained, showing us nuggets found with a metal detector west of Kingman. "Chloride as a gold-mining district is totally erroneous."

At 6.5 miles, the road forked again. Milner and Lawsen went left to the 500-foot-deep Rainbow Mine. Lagging behind, I turned right onto the main road, but I didn't know it. Lawsen carried the only map.

I squeezed the steering wheel tighter as I imagined a washout forcing me to back down the steep, narrow road. I aimed for tailings that turned out to be the Lucky Boy Mine. A few curves higher put me on the graded summit road, where eventually the three of us reunited.