calamajue question

I always wanted to do the trip from the Calamajue wash and/or Coco's east to the coast when riding there....and Coco always discouraged it saying "There are bad people there".....so I never did that ride....Likely it is OK to explore that area....the road conditions were not my concern as much as Coco's opinion....



And I am NOT a "Be afraid of Baja" guy....but try to appreciate the opinions of locals....if you do that stretch, let us know how it is....


Approaching the Wash from the south:



Looking north from the Wash:









[Edited on 10-24-2009 by motoged]

I looked through Tim's posts on Nomad and didn't see it, Lou...

Fortunately, I have most or all of TimsBaja.com saved...

Here is the part about the explosives near Coco's (I have Tim's photos of it as well)...

Exploring Baja Norte
Jan. 23-27, 2004 - Page 4

Sunday, January 25, 2004 (part 2)

Once back on the main road, we continued south to our next destination – our second of three caches we had previously left in Baja. "Baja Crevice Cache" is located in the desert, just off the main road. We hiked to the cache, and found everything in good order. This cache container, a plastic bin bought at K-Mart, was still in excellent shape, just a little dusty.

No maintenance necessary, so we left our cache and continued on our drive to our next stop – Coco’s Corner. Any frequent visitor to this area knows about Coco. He lives out in the middle of the desert, where the dirt road forks off – the left-hand path leading to Calamajue, the right-hand path to the pavement of Mexico Hwy. 1. We always made a point of visiting Coco on our trips. He is a wonderful source of information, knowing all there is to know about the roads and good sites in the area.

While we were there, we asked Coco about any interesting sites to see. He told us of the ‘mina de oro’ – gold mine. He said it was abandoned, and a pretty cool place to see. He gave us directions:

“Drive down the road to Calamajue ........ pass the gate ............., etc.” As he said the instructions, he was also drawing a map for us. It seemed like an easy path to take.

“After the mine, the road is good. You don’t have to turn around. Stay on it, but if you come up to La Paloma, you’ve gone too far, turn around.”

“How will we know when we've reached La Paloma?” I asked.

“You’ll know when you get there,” he said. “There’s a big troque”. Hmm… a truck? Well, we took him for his word. He had never been wrong with us before.

“If you reach La Paloma, turn around and find the small road leading north. That road catches back up with the main road that goes to Gonzaga. From that junction it’s only 10 more miles back to Gonzaga. And it’s a good road. I drove through there in 1960.

“Before you get to Hwy. 5, you also cross a small airstrip – you can’t miss it.”

We signed Coco’s guest book, left him a dozen or so Nutri-Grain bars, and were on our way to do more exploring. First, though, we had a cache to find. “Baja Coco” is very close to Coco’s Corner. In fact, you are only 100 yards away and in full view of Coco all the time. He was probably wondering what those two gringos were doing over by those rocks?

After about 5 minutes of searching, we found the small cache container. We logged ourselves into the book and drove off on the Calamajue road to find this “mina de oro”.

After driving for a while, we spotted what appeared to be a very good road to our left at the point where Coco said it would be. We stopped, Rob marked the coordinates in the GPS, and we drove on. The road was in very good shape, and within 5 minutes we had driven a little over 2 miles and were at the mine.

The road splits off at the mine – one road leads up a hill, the other continues on. The road leading up the hill had a very clear sign, “peligroso – explosivos!” Well, we are adventurers, how could we resist this challenge?


We drove up the hill towards the explosives site. At the top of the road, there is another sign, again warning not to continue. Then there is a small concrete shack, surrounded by a chain link fence with barbwire all around the top. There was a lock on the gate of the fence. Someone was definitely trying to keep us out of there.

We walked to the fence and found an easy way inside. The door to the shack was not locked, so we opened it up and walked inside. The room was no more than 6 to 8 feet wide. The ceiling maybe 10 feet high, with many holes and a lot of plastic tarp covering the holes. A wood bench stretched all around the shack, about two feet off the ground and up against the wall. On top of the bench were many boxes, all about 1 1/2 feet square, and all marked clearly in English – “DANGER, HIGH EXPLOSIVES”. The boxes had one string of bale wire around, but they were also very damaged – probably from water seeping in whenever it rained.

At the corner directly across from the door were a men’s jacket, a blanket, and something covered underneath. We attempted to lift the blanket, but whatever was underneath was pretty heavy. The first thoughts that crossed our minds was that we would find a skeleton. But after removing enough of the blanket, we could see the heavy object. It was a roll of blast wire.


At the right end of the bench, one of the boxes was torn open. We peeked in very, very carefully to see what was in side. The box was completely full of plastic explosives. Each piece of explosive was about the size of a stick of dynamite. Combine this plastic with the blast wire and you would have a very potent blast!

We also noticed something interesting inside the shack, a Spanish-language newspaper from March 2000. It appeared that was how long it had been since the mine was in use.


***-NOTE-*** I know that we are probably going to get a lot of flack from people about doing what we did. It was something that was done at the spur of the moment, we were feeling adventurous and decided to try it. Looking back on the situation, it was definitely not a smart thing to do. I don’t necessarily regret doing it, since it was adventurous and we didn’t get hurt, and I will not tell others that they should not attempt to see the location – it’s not my place to tell others what to do or what to see. Adults can make their own decisions using their own common sense. What I will ask is that anyone trying to see this spot to please take extreme, extreme caution. This can be a very dangerous place, and we were lucky to come out OK.

I obviously had an opportunity to not include this part of our trip in my story. But that would not be fair to others or to myself. This is what happened, and I am not going to sugarcoat anything or omit things just because they make me look like a fool in someone else’s eyes. If I was worried about the possible negativity of others towards me, I wouldn’t have a website and/or share my stories with others. Remember, to succeed, you first have to learn from your failures. Now, back to the story…………………