Photo © Tony Huegel / Backcountry Byways

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The following was sent to us on 4/09/06 By Tony Huegel, the well known backroads guide author. He sent this text as a companion for the photo above and with permission for us to post it here. Thanks Tony!

I pulled up to Schmidt's camp -- and Tonie Seger's home -- one hot and breezy day in July 1994. With the AC in my 4Runner running non-stop, I was exploring the El Pasos for the first edition of my adventure-driving guidebook "California Desert Byways." A sign amid the rustic old cabins asked visitors -- I was the only one -- to sign the register at the "museum" that was Schmidt's old cabin. I did, while marveling at the remarkable assortment of what seemed like junk, but which to others were historic artifacts. Pots, pans, tools, old ore cars, you name it. And amid it all, there was a satellite dish! Then I noticed a sign: "Keep Dogs off Lawn," it admonished. Looking in my notebook now, in 2006, I can still sense my reaction: "Huh?" I wrote.

The place was silent, but for the pigeons and the growing wind. A Jeep Cherokee and a Taurus sedan were parked outside. A few pieces of laundry were drying on a line. Suddenly Tonie Seger emerged from her cabin, giving me a bit of a start. But she was so friendly, so willing to share her story of a "city girl" buying the place for her husband's health, and so eager to show me around that I imimediately felt welcome.

"I didn't know what I was doing," she said, looking back on the purchase in 1963. As a journalist, I had the sense to write down what she was telling me. "They called me the city woman and college fool when I came here." She showed me through the odd little "museum" that had been Schmidt's cabin. The walls and ceiling were lined with maps. "Yup," she said. "Insulation."

She showed me an old, dusty binder in which visitors -- she'd get 50 to 100 in a weekend between September and June, she said -- bearing names primarily from Southern California, but from all over the world as well. "It isn't Disneyland or Knott's Berry Farm," she conceded, "but it's something people can come to." She'd only had one problem visitor, she said. Then she corrected herself. "He wasn't a visitor. He was a sneek."

She joked then that she was 93 years old, but I took her to be well into her 70s. And I wondered at how this hearty woman -- as she explained it, she was a registered nurse raised in Vermont and educated at Massachusetts' exclusive Wellesley College for women -- came to live alone in this snapshot of the authentic Wild West. It was for her late husband's health, she said. But they came too late; he died a few months after she bought the place.

I had arrived at 12:30 p.m., according to my notes. I left at 1:45 p.m. The visit was a privilege, and the memory has lingered with me since. That's the magic of exploring the backways of the American West.

Thanks for the memory, Tonie.

Tony Huegel, author
Backcountry Byways guidebooks
www.wildernesspress.com

Known as the "Tunnel lady", Tonie lived in the buildings to the right of the old Schmidt Cabin which is on the far west side (left side). Tonie called the old Schmidt cabin "The Museum". The Museum and the other structures have been vandalized. Few, if any artifacts are left. Click to see what the Museum looks like today

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