20 Mule Team Days

On the morning of September 19, 2026, ten parade entries lined up in front of the Twenty Mule Team Museum on Twenty Mule Team Road in Boron, an unincorporated Kern County town in the Mojave Desert. The theme for the 2026 edition of 20 Mule Team Days was “Mule Mines and Good Times.” Before the parade stepped off, the winner of the Honorary Mayor contest was announced. Shelley Hazelton had run unopposed.

The grand marshal was Coach Mitch Naka’ahiki. His family rode in the front entry, and a tribute float followed. Behind them came:

• Price’s Academy, out of California City
• the California Breakfast Burritos Burros, carrying Kern County Supervisor Chris Parlier and his field representative Karen Sanders
• the Boron Community Queens
• Wind in the Willows Preschool
• West Boron Elementary School
• a man the Mojave Desert News identified only as Darryl, on his three-wheeled Harley-Davidson

The route ran east on Twenty Mule Team Road, turned north on Boron Avenue, and ended at Boron Community Park, on the corner of Boron Avenue and John Street.

At the park the Kramer Junction Band played from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Committee member Dominique Espindola described the setup to the Mojave Desert News: “We have several vendors set up. We have some bounce houses for the kids and Wind in the Willows is serving hot dogs, bottled water, sodas and snow cones.” There was a face-painting booth. Other booths belonged to Bartz-Altadonna, Safe Haven Kids League, Peldyn’s, the Boron Senior Center, and the Borax Visitor Center. Inside the community building, Price’s Academy assistant instructor Joe Sheridan taught children how to defend themselves. Hazelton told the paper the committee had wanted the town’s youth involved as much as possible.

The tribute float stood afterward in the park’s parking lot. Espindola credited its design, as best she recalled, to Joanna Croffutt, Brittany Martin, and Hazelton: “They all got together and they decided to put the float together in honor of Mitch.” Entered as the Mitch Naka’ahiki Memorial float, it took first place in the parade. The Wind in the Willows Preschool float placed second and the Boron Community Queens float third. In the week before the parade, the Boron Chamber of Commerce Events Committee had written that for more than 30 years Naka’ahiki “has coached, volunteered, stepped up, and poured his heart into this community and our kids.” The committee also announced a fundraiser in his support, to be held September 26 at Domingo’s Mexican Restaurant.

The mayor of an unincorporated town

Boron has no municipal government and no actual mayor. According to the Chamber’s Events Committee, the honorary title goes to whichever citizen raises the most money for charity. Candidates campaign with humorous platforms, wild promises, and slogans. Votes are cast as donations, so a resident may buy as many as they like. The money traditionally goes to civic improvements, youth programs, the senior center, and local museums. The winner represents the town at parades and ribbon cuttings.

The committee’s account of past officeholders includes Domingo Gutierrez, a longtime business owner who handed out autographed posters of himself. It also includes Dale Slavinski, who served several terms. Slavinski is said to have enlisted the Boron High School football team to hold up the wings of a retired Saab fighter jet so it could be reassembled at the aerospace museum without renting a crane.

Hazelton unseated Slavinski in 2025, in a three-way race that also included Becky Thompson. She was declared the winner on Friday, October 17, 2025, at a fundraising spaghetti dinner at the Boron Seniors Center. She received certificates from Assemblyman Tom Lackey, a Boron native, from the Chamber, and from Supervisor Parlier.

Three autumns on Twenty Mule Team Road

The 2025 celebration was held the next day, October 18. Twenty-two entries followed grand marshal Marybeth Garrison, Manager of Community Affairs for Rio-Tinto Borates & Lithium. The parade started at the Ricon Latino Restaurant, went east on Twenty Mule Team Road, made a U-turn, came back west, and turned left onto Boron Avenue to the park. Lackey rode with the 2025 Antelope Valley Queens. The park held two bounce houses and a corn hole tournament. Inside the community building were a baby beautiful contest and a chili cook-off. That night the senior center ran bingo at 6:30.

The year before, the event had come back. After several years without it, Boron held 20 Mule Team Days on Saturday, October 12, 2024. It coincided with a reunion of Boron High School classes 1979 through 1990. The Friday before brought three events:

• the dedication and renaming of the football stadium
• a homecoming game between the Boron Bobcats and the Desert Scorpions
• the Kramer Junction Band at the VFW post

The Saturday parade started at Twenty Mule Team Road and James Street. At the park were a mechanical bull, a beer garden, a petting zoo, and food trucks. Organizer Brooke Ratliff said she could not have done it without the volunteers and businesses who helped. Among the donors listed was the honorary mayor at the time, Dale Slavinski.

Before the pause, the Chamber had posted a Twenty Mule Team Days Parade and Festival for Saturday, October 1, 2016, at 9 a.m. in downtown Boron.

“She burns green, Rosie”

The teams the festival honors worked out of Death Valley. According to the Twenty Mule Team Museum’s history, in 1881 the prospector Aaron Winters and his wife Rosie were living at Ash Meadows. They put up a wandering prospector, Henry Spiller, for the night. Spiller showed them crystals of a mineral he called cottonball and told them of a test: pour alcohol and sulfuric acid over the crystals and set them alight, and if the flame burned green, it was borax. Winters realized there were acres of the stuff on the ancient lake beds of the valley floor. He rode out the next morning and gathered a bagful. After sundown the couple ran the test. “She burns green, Rosie,” he shouted. “We’re rich, by God!” They sold the claim to William T. Coleman, a San Francisco businessman, for $20,000.

Coleman’s Harmony Borax Works stood near Furnace Creek. The museum dates its opening to 1882, while the Death Valley Conservancy says production started in late 1883. Chinese laborers scraped the cottonball from the lake bed; the museum gives their pay as $1.50 a day. Summer heat drove Coleman to build a second plant at Amargosa. The nearest railroad was at Mojave, 165 miles off.

Superintendent J.W.S. Perry, a trained druggist by the Conservancy’s account, designed wagons to carry ten tons each. They were built in Mojave at $900 apiece, with rear wheels seven feet tall, front wheels five feet tall, and iron tires eight inches wide. Perry and a young muleskinner named Ed Stiles hitched two ten-mule teams into one. The team was in fact 18 mules and two horses, steered by a jerk line run up to the lead mules. A steady pull turned the team left; a series of jerks turned it right. Three men worked each team:

• the driver, who sat on the lead wagon
• the muleskinner, who rode one of the horses
• the swamper, who rode the rear wagon, worked its brake on the downgrades, and served as cook and dishwasher

The trip out took ten days.

The museum, the Mojave Desert News, and American Trails give the teams’ years as 1883 to 1889. The marker at the Borax Visitor Center says 1883 to 1888. In 1888, the Conservancy writes, Congress removed the import tariff on borax, prices fell, and Coleman’s empire collapsed. Francis Marion Smith bought the claims, but Harmony never reopened. American Trails adds that teams later hauled from Borate, near Calico, to Daggett from 1891 to 1898, until a railroad replaced them.

The brand outlived the hauling. Stephen T. Mather, marketing manager at the Pacific Coast Borax Company’s Chicago headquarters, is credited with the Twenty Mule Team campaign. In 1917 he became the first director of the National Park Service. The company’s Death Valley Days went on the radio in 1930.

The mine, the wagons, and the museum lot

The borax now comes from Boron. U.S. Borax records that an underground mine opened at the present site in 1927, and that in 1957 engineers began converting it to a surface mine. The marker puts the operation at 20 square miles. Rio-Tinto Borates & Lithium sponsored the 2025 celebration, and the Borax Visitor Center Foundation has awarded grants to the local 20 Mule Team Days.

Outside the visitor center, on Borax Road north of Highway 58, stands a set of Twenty Mule Team wagons. The Historical Marker Database records that most of the paint was removed in 2025 and that a shelter was built over the display in 2026. In April 2026 the visitor center opened the restored display, dedicated to Bobby Tanner, the last muleskinner for U.S. Borax, who died in June 2024.

Accounts of the surviving wagons differ. The database page holds that three original sets survive:

• the largest, at Harmony Borax Works
• a smaller set built at Alf’s Blacksmith Shop in Daggett for shorter hauls, now in Boron
• a second Daggett set, at the ranch museum in Furnace Creek

It says the Boron set is the only one that can still travel and has appeared in the Rose Parade. The Death Valley Conservancy writes that legend long held three sets had survived. Its research, down to a count of 18 spokes on the rear wheels, found that only one intact set remains of the five built in Mojave: the set at Harmony. Both accounts agree that the Harmony wagons are the only surviving set that made the run to Mojave.

The museum where the 2026 parade formed began in the late 1970s, when members of the Chamber of Commerce decided the town needed one. The Chamber was offered a mile-long strip between Boron Avenue and the railroad spur to the borax mine for $8,000. Residents, former residents, and outsiders bought bumper stickers and volcanic ash from Mount St. Helens, sent by a former resident living in Washington. There were also auctions, dime-a-dip dinners, and variety shows with local talent. By the museum’s account, the land was bought one square foot at a time.