INDIANS "FIRE VALLEY."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19098, 17 August 1925, Page 9

INDIANS "FIRE VALLEY."

WEIRD HOT SPRINGS AREA. DESOLATE CALIFORNIAN CANYON An authentic and graphic word picture of the famous yet little known Fire Valley of the Indians, located ia one of the most desolate regions of Death Valley, California, has been brought to San Francisco, by Mr. F. J. Sanders, of Inyo County. The Pah Ute Indian word for firo is Coso, and to the Inyo Indians the Coso region has been known for many generations, in evidenco of which, Mr. Sanders says, are to be found tc-day hundreds of picture drawings and Indian hieroglyphics on the rocks surrounding the hot springs and steam geysers. The valley is in a canyon-like depression of the Coso Mountains, long familiar to prospectors and miners, but only becamo known to the outside world in the last two years. Its location is some 20 miles south east of Keeler and along the road that early Death Valley gold seekers beat through Darwin, Ballarat and Panamint. The easiest way in now, says Mr. Sanders, is by Little Lake, a station on the Los Angeles-Owens Valloy line. The hot springs area covers several miles of the trough of the canyon, and extends down into the sagebrush messa of the desert below. Here are bubbling hundreds of mudpots, mud volcanoes, mud and sulphur springs and some gigantic steam boilers. Because of the highlymineralised character of this part, of California the vapours and mud springs are highly impiegnated with all sorts of minerals, some of which have been found to have wonderful health-giving quali ties, Mr. Sanders avers. It was their medicinal character and not the infernal noises, Mr. Sanders thinks, that took the Indians there, and it was for the same reason that they had declared this region the Valley of Perpetual Peaco. In early times the white settlers of the • Inyo country visited the Coso region occasionally to take mud baths, whicb \vere k.nown to have curative qualities for rheumatism and similar complaints, but no effort was made to commercialise these springs until quite recently when a small resort hotel was built there by the Coso Hot Springs Company, and bottling works were established for the sour-tasting spring water Geologically the Coso springs are of the solfataric type, says Mr. Sanders which means that they are the vapourings of a dying volcanic activity. At one time the volcauic action here was tremendous and one huge crater of quite recent geologic time is near the geysers.