Once part of Monterey County, the abandoned New Idria mercury mine is a both a ghost town and Superfund site.

There’s always a good reason why a ghost town becomes one.

In the case of New Idria Mine, a ghost town and former mercury mine 20-some miles southeast of Pinnacles National Park, there are at least two reasons. Foremost, the mine shut down in 1972, so all the work dried up. Second, the place is toxic: In 2011, the federal government listed it as a Superfund site, and not only has cleanup of the mine yet to begin, but the federal government doesn’t yet have a plan for how it will carry it out.

The mine is about 100 road miles from the Weekly’s office in Seaside, but it took almost three hours in a friend’s Honda HRV to reach it. Everything slowed down once we got onto New Idria Road in Panoche Valley – the path was pitted from there. This was after we’d already passed one sign near Paicines telling us the road was closed, but we figured we’d try our luck. (The mine can also be reached from the southwest on Clear Creek Road through the Bureau of Land Management’s Clear Creek Management Area – it’s popular with gemstone hunters and off-road enthusiasts – but one must apply for a permit, which will give you the code to pass through locked gates.)

After leaving Panoche Valley and climbing up a rocky canyon along San Carlos Creek, the road eventually becomes too steep and rugged for anything but motorcycles, ATVs or high-clearance 4-wheel-drives.

But my friend and I figured we were only about a half-mile from the mine, so we parked and trod uphill on foot, not to be denied. Running alongside the road is San Carlos Creek, flowing with water that looks like rust-colored milk, because, we would soon learn, a pond of the same color at the mine was feeding into the creek.

There are few derelict houses and buildings at the site, though the refinery itself is now surrounded by a chain link fence.

Nearby, slapped on a road sign reading “HILL”, are two stickers reading “The Sierra Club Sucks.”

The mine dates back to 1854 – mercury bonds with gold particles, and became a key commodity needed to harvest gold once the Gold Rush was on – and according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, was the second most productive mercury mine in North America.

In July 1861, William H. Brewer, chief botanist with the California Division of Mines and Geology, visited the mine for two days during part of his four-year geologic tour of the state, and recorded his observations.

“Sulphurous acids, arsenic, vapors of mercury, etc., make a horrible atmosphere, which tells fearfully on the health of the workmen, but the wages always command men and there is no want of hands,” Brewer wrote of the men who cleaned the refinery’s furnaces three or four times a year. “Many have their health ruined forever by the three or four days’ labor, and all are injured; but the wages, twenty dollars a day, always bring victims.”

At the time, the area was still part of Monterey County – San Benito County was formed in 1874 – and Brewer wrote, of its remoteness: “I can hardly conceive a place with fewer of the comforts of life – a community by itself, 75 miles from the nearest town (San Juan [Bautista]) and 135 from the county seat, separated from the rest of the world by desert mountains, a fearfully hot climate… where all the necessities of life have to be brought from a great distance in wagons in the hot sun.”

Situated in a bowl surrounded by 4,500-foot-tall peaks, it became a preferred hideout for notorious outlaw Tiburcio Vasquez (see story, p. 20). It was remote, and also offered his essential creature comforts: cantinas, gambling halls and bordellos.

Vasquez had an agreement with the mine’s superintendent that he would let him stay there if he didn’t cause any trouble, and Vasquez always got tips from his friends when the law was coming, and never once got caught there.

Little of the place’s history is evident at the site today, but perhaps because of its desolation, one can still feel its ghosts.