Today there is a small mining pick monument dedicated to Vernon Pick in 1955 on Earthquake TrailĪ USGS overview of the San Andreas Fault provided a few more clues. Ironically, both locations had atomic bomb shelters. He also built Walden North in British Columbia, Canada. He was rather reclusive and at one point owned his own island. The lab worked on prospecting and radiation detection equipment and in using electronics in automation. A newspaper article only a few years old had been written on Pick. And what we found was practically radioactive. With part of his fortune he bought “Welch-Hurst” and he renamed it “Walden West.” The name was derived from the book, “Walden,” by author, philosopher, and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau.Īrmed with this intriguing piece of information, we began to dig a little deeper. military earning several million dollars at the time. Pick had discovered Uranium in the west (Wyoming or Colorado) and sold his claim to the U.S. In the 1950s a man named Pick lived in the log style house. The history of the building included an interesting footnote: A certain building, the Welch-Hurst house, built in 1908, and a popular hostel in the 70s, came up several times. We first heard of the Laboratories mentioned off-handedly in the course of our research, as a side note in the history of the redwood forests in the area of Los Gatos and Santa Cruz. But in all of the hundred-odd sites we came across in the first five years of urbex, none would prove so tantalizing as the Vernon J. We grew used to disappointment– the more exciting a site sounded in research, the less hope we had of ever seeing in person. In the course of our explorations, we spent dozens of hours researching dead ends– ghost towns now at the bottom of reservoirs, abandoned mental hospitals now parking lots, forgotten cabins labeled as a question mark on a map. This is a story about a uranium millionaire, an ancient redwood forest, a fallout shelter, and a man named Earthworm.
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