The road to get to this cache is not often traveled, and definitely requires high clearance and 4x4. While on the path, you are on an easement through a portion of the Four Peaks Wilderness. Please do not stray from the path and enter side roads or washes in your vehicle, as the easement is limited only to the road. More information about this area can be found here: Four Peaks Wilderness Area.
It is unlikely that you will have a phone signal out here, and this road is very rarely traveled. For those in 2WD vehicles, you can park at the listed Parking Spot as a safe alternative and hike in. The cache is maybe a mile in, and on the way to GCKP96.
Lo, the ubiquitous Indian!
There is an Indian in almost every lost mine story and it is almost imperative that this is so.
For Indians often were responsible for the discovery of a bonanza that later would be lost. Sometimes they would show a white man where the gold was to repay a favor (or maybe because Indians were amused by the sight of a grown man jumping up and down and going into joyfuI hysterics over a few rocks). Sometimes they told white men of distant lodes of gold to get them out of the neighborhood (the Indian points: "Eight days toward the sunset, in Apacheria, is much gold, enough to load a pack horse.").
Apacheria as the site of those bonanzas was the catch. It was almost inevitable that an Apache war party would surprise the prospectors at their diggings. There was usually one survivor, who hid in the brush during the attack and then made it, in a long and crooked way, back to civilization. He would be ragged, halfstarved and confused. He would spend the rest of his life in fruitless attempts to return to the gold - but two weeks of wandering in the wilderness and subsisting on mesquite beans and mud-puddle water tend to give a man a poor sense of direction.
In other stories Indians would bring nuggets or dust to the white man, as gifts or as a medium of exchange, but refuse to tell where it came from. One thing the Indian has learned in his dealing with the white man is how to keep his mouth shut.
The Indian in the Four Peaks Gold story was an old horse wrangler known to Central Arizona ranchers as Puncher Bob . . His Tonto Apache name was lretaba.
Thirty years ago lretaba, then 86 years old and almost blind, told a mining engineer named Colby Thomas about the gold . Unlike frontier Indians, Iretaba wanted to profit from the gold. It would make his remaining years more comfortable.
lretaba told Thomas that two white men found a rich ledge of gold-bearing quartz east of the Four Peaks in the late 1870s, and had worked the mine for only a few days when Tonto Apaches killed them.
lretaba's father was one of the attackers and he often talked to his son about the killings and where the gold was. When lretaba was a halfgrown boy he visited the ledge and was severely punished by the elders of the tribe. Stay away from the gold, they warned him, it brings nothing but trouble.
Iretaba told Thomas the ledge was due east of Mine Mountain, maybe two or three miles from it. At a place where a wash divides, he said, the forks go northwest and south. Take the south fork for three or four miles, lretaba directed, and you will come to old diggings. Climb out of the wash at that point and look for a large palo verde tree. Twenty feet southwest from the tree is the ledge of gold.
Although Thomas was 80 years old when lretaba told him of the gold he tried to find it and failed. He sought the aid of a younger man, Ed Abbott, and they failed, too, in a joint effort. Thomas and Abbott went to the house where lretaba stayed when he was in Phoenix, to ask him for more explicit directions. They were told the old Indian had not been seen for months.
Thomas died in 1952 and Abbott apparently never tried again.
Somewhere Out There Cache Series
GC6ZVBF- The Hassayampa Strongbox
GC6ZVBB- The Organ Grinder's Ledge
GC6ZVB7- The Wickenburg Payroll
GC6ZVB9- The Black Prospector's Secret
GC6AV5B- The Lost Frenchman
GC6BDGK- The Jabonero Waybill
GC7EGMW- Four Peaks Gold
GC7EGKH- The Tonto Quartz
GC7EVJX- Lost Gold of Sanders