Searles Lake: Borax and the Twenty Mule Team
Near Ridgecrest, California
The dry lakebed beside the town of Trona holds one of the richest mineral deposits on Earth. In eighteen sixty-two, a prospector named John Searles, hunting for gold and silver, instead spotted borax crusted on the surface of the lake that now carries his name. In eighteen seventy-three, he and his brother Dennis formed a mining company and began pulling wealth from the brine.
To move that refined borax to market, John Searles hauled it in wagons pulled by long teams of twenty mules, across about one hundred seventy-five miles of desert to the harbor at San Pedro. Here is a fact often confused. The famous Twenty Mule Team brand is usually tied to Death Valley, but John Searles is credited with being first to haul borax with twenty mule wagons, right here at Searles Lake.
Today the company Searles Valley Minerals still works the lake, drawing out borax, soda ash, boric acid, and salt. Rockhounds prize the place for rare crystals like hanksite, found in very few places on the planet, with Searles Lake holding nearly all of it. Every October, collectors gather for a beloved event called the Gem-O-Rama to dig them by hand.
