Burro Schmidt's Tunnel to Nowhere

Look east, past the Garlock and Randsburg turnoffs, to the dark granite ridges of the El Paso Mountains. Hidden up there is one of California's strangest monuments to human stubbornness: a half-mile tunnel bored clean through a mountain entirely by hand.

William Henry Schmidt came west from Rhode Island around 1894, after tuberculosis killed six of his brothers and sisters. He believed the dry desert air would spare him. By 1906 he was prospecting gold claims on the far side of Copper Mountain and decided he needed a shortcut to carry ore over the ridge to a smelter. So he started digging — with a pick, a four-pound hammer, a shovel, and carefully placed dynamite.

He kept at it for 32 years. People called him "Burro" for his two pack animals, Jack and Jenny, who hauled supplies but never set foot in the tunnel. By the time he broke through to daylight in 1938 he had moved an estimated 5,800 tons of rock, much of it by wheelbarrow, through a passage about six feet tall.

Here is the twist documented sources agree on: he never needed it. A wagon road from Last Chance Canyon to Mojave was finished around 1920, making the tunnel pointless before it was half done. And Schmidt never hauled a single load of ore through it. He simply finished, sold the claim, and moved on. He died in 1954.

His newspaper-insulated cabin still stands at the north portal — local lore says some of the headlines date to the 1935 Lindbergh kidnapping trial. For decades a caretaker named Tonie Seger guided visitors through. The site is now on the National Register of Historic Places: a tribute not to gold, but to one man's refusal to quit.