Down the Muddy

January 18, 2026

This was a nice, long walk down Muddy Creek, but I didn’t find everything I was hoping to and I’ll have to return for another try. I left home early and the eastern sky brightened as I drove south. As I passed Hunter Power Plant I felt an urge to stop and take a photo of it backlit by a beautiful orange and blue gradient but there were power lines along the highway that would’ve ruined the shot. Then the power lines changed direction and I had a clear view, so I jammed on the brakes and snapped a few nice shots from the side of the road.

Hunter Power Plant before dawn

I’ve been saving the hike for the dead of winter due to the likelihood of needing to cross the creek, in the hopes that it would be frozen over. The USGS stream gauge had been reading “ice affected” for weeks prior to this so I assumed that meant it was frozen solid, but I arrived to find the creek flowing too wide and deep to cross without getting wet and very cold. Fortunately everything I wanted to see on this trip was on one side of the creek, with the exception of one cabin, so I pressed on knowing it would be a worthwhile hike while still hoping I could find a place to cross closer to the cabin. It was a very chilly walk to my first point of interest, a small village site on the bench above the creek. The first structure I saw was a ring of rocks on bedrock, so I’m not sure it was actually a pit house. Another rough circle of basalt rocks was likely a pit house, and one last structure was certainly one with its well-defined rock walls and a central depression.

An icy Muddy Creek

Circular structure

Probable pit house

Grinding pits in a basalt boulder

Pit house

The sun finally rose enough to warm things up as I hiked the next mile or so to what I thought looked like a cabin in Google Earth. To my surprise it was actually an ore chute. There was some old junk lying around, and what appeared to be a road cut leading up the hillside behind the chute. I followed it to the top of the hill and a bit beyond, realizing it was only a cattle trail. I thought I recognized that the ore being mined was manganese due to its similarity to another mine I came across a year ago, and after returning home from this trip I found this is indeed a manganese deposit referred to as the “Snow Deposit” in this 1952 USGS bulletin (page 83 of the PDF). I looked around in the hills for a mine shaft or trench but didn’t find anything, and when I went back to the ore chute area I realized that what I initially thought was a road cut was actually just a small surface mine. There were no other workings visible near the ore chute so I think it was a pretty small and short-lived operation.

Faint trace of the old road

Circle petroglyphs

Road cut

Frozen creek

Ore chute

Conveyor

Above the ore chute

1951 section corner

Vehicle frame

Vehicle floor pan

Cow trail or old road?

Another road/trail cut across the wash

On the hill above the mine

Mine cut and ore pile

Not far away was a collapsed cabin with a bed and appliances. I’m not able to specifically date either the mine or the appliances, but I found some references to this model of stove in old newspaper ads dating from 1914 through 1927, and the refrigerator looks similar to some from the 1930s based on a Google Images search. I hiked farther up the side canyon above the cabin looking for any additional mining activity but didn’t find anything.

Collapsed cabin

Part of the stove

Helpmate Universal stove, No. 168-16

Refrigerator

Fold-out bed

Mattress spring

Some sort of tank

Wash above the mine

Where I turned around in the side canyon

I moved along down the Muddy and, as I neared the cabin on the other side of the creek, I began looking for a place to cross. Everything was either too deep, too wide, or the rocks were too ice-covered to safely hop across. I did get a decent look at the cabin from a distance and it appears worthy of a future hike using a different approach route. The construction method of the cabin and the relics I could see around it indicate it was likely an early attempt at farming the river bottom, possibly as old as the late 1800s.

Cow trail

Cairn and wooden post

Fallen fence

Too wide and deep to cross

View toward the cabin

Zoom shot of the cabin

Continuing downstream, my next goal was to find some granaries whose location I didn’t know but I felt pretty confident I could find them. 10 years earlier a friend had mentioned the granaries to me with only a very general location, and later on I found some old photos online from an archaeological survey in the late 1920s. Those photos show which geological rock layer the granaries were in, which narrowed my search to a roughly one-mile stretch of the creek. In one place on a bench above the creek I found the faint remains of a large circular structure. Not much of the structure itself was left so I’m not sure whether it was a habitation site or some sort of lookout, but I did find a tiny metate and some potsherds on the ground.

Continuing downstream

Fallen cattle fence below

View down the Muddy

Circular structure

Part of the wall

View from the structure

Bottom of the metate

Metate in my hand for scale

Potsherds

I kept hiking and checking the ledges for those granaries but I never found them. I turned around once I reached the end of the rock layer I thought the granaries were in and followed mostly the same path back upstream. In a few places I stayed low, closer to river level, where previously I’d gone high while looking for the granaries, and I found a couple of rock art panels I’d missed. When I returned to my starting point I’d covered about 13 miles. It was disappointing not finding the granaries. After returning home I checked all the available information I had on them, some of which I hadn’t referred to in 10 years, and I realized that had I simply refreshed my memory beforehand I would have located them. What a dummy. 😀 I’ve now pinpointed the exact location and I’ll have to do another hike to see what I missed–possibly two more hikes if I go again when I’m unable to cross the creek to see that cabin.

Another fallen fence