There’s gold in Death Valley. White gold.
It took prospectors Aaron and Rosie Winters to discover it in the late 1800s, a San Francisco businessman to develop it, a television and radio show to market it – and today’s environmental movement to give it its due. We’re talking about sodium borate, or borax, a common laundry product used for more than 100 years.
Borax is found primarily in two places on the planet: Turkey and the California desert. Visitors see evidence of it throughout Death Valley National Park, where there is a museum dedicated to the mineral located at the Ranch at Furnace Creek Resort in the park.
The borax museum is housed in a small building, the oldest structure in the park (circa 1883). It was first an office, then a shack, then an ore control station for miners at the Monte Blanco deposits. The small museum is filled with artifacts from the borax mining era, and there are antique wagons, carriages, and a steam locomotive in the back.
