They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and that truism translates to 10,000 years’ worth of discoveries at Death Valley National Park.

Discarded items — ranging from Victorian era clothing to a mysterious memento left by a “Jim” — await rediscovery, undisturbed, in the California park’s barren deserts or atop its rugged mountains, all of which endure the world’s most extreme weather conditions. 

That’s where Alissa Leavitt-Reynolds and her team of historians and archeologists make new (and sometimes very strange) discoveries, with the help of Death Valley visitors. 

“The desert is a weird place,” Leavitt-Reynolds, cultural resources manager at the park, told SFGATE. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

What kind of stuff is out there? It runs the gamut, really.

From rusty beer cans to Indigenous fire pits — even oddly placed wedding souvenirs. There is evidence of human activity throughout Death Valley’s 3.4 million acres — a vast and largely desolate area that’s about the size of Connecticut. There aren’t a ton of trails in Death Valley, which means many of these artifacts are found in the park’s offroad areas and backcountry. “It’s surprisingly widespread,” Leavitt-Reynolds said.

The Timbisha Shoshone tribe were the first known people in Death Valley. Their hunting skills and migration practices helped the tribe survive the valley’s unforgiving environment for centuries. Evidence of their activity has been discovered, both by accident and through guidance from the tribe’s few remaining elders. 

“We have found pollen and food pieces that are left on grinding stones that can tell us what food they were eating,” Leavitt-Reynolds said. “Part of it is through consultation. We work with their elders. They tell us where their winter camps and summer camps were.” 

Some of the tribe’s direction has also informed National Park Service rangers about sensitive cultural areas in the park.

Other Indigenous items that have been recovered include all kinds of tools, and evidence of lost trail sites and expansive systems once used for traversing the region.

Centuries later, Europeans entered the valley with one thing on their mind — gold.

“We have a lot of historic mines out there,” Leavitt-Reynolds said. “Those vary from individual prospectors all the way up to massive companies that would have been mining for gold or talc. We see evidence of that mining history everywhere. Sometimes that means we have sites that we have to look at to determine how dangerous they are.” 

With the mines, there are tons of backcountry cabins throughout the park in various states of disrepair. In some cases, the weather deteriorated sites down to their foundation. For other sites, opportunistic people were thought to have “borrowed” materials and housing parts from cabins left abandoned just a few years prior.

Those very miners left smaller items behind too, like cooking utensils, beer cans and milk containers from as far back as the 1800s at the old campsites. “You can look at it and tell how [beer] can technology has changed over time,” Leavitt-Reynolds said.

In the rare event an item has been shielded from the harsh elements of Death Valley, the cultural resources team is sometimes able to identify it using the intact original label.

“People find stuff and bring it back to us,” Leavitt-Reynolds said. “We had an 1860s frying pan that someone just found at probably an old miner’s camp. They were worried that someone else would find it and steal it. The problem was they couldn’t quite remember where they found it.” 

That’s why park officials have asked visitors to leave artifacts in place in an effort to preserve Death Valley’s history.

“In some cases, you’ll find pieces of clothing like a corset. It’s evidence that a woman had been there. I’ve been to other places and I’ve found marbles. Then I’ll know children had been there. The reason we leave things on site is because if we picked it up no one would ever know that. We lose that story and the depth of history. That’s why archeologists get a little tight-lipped about what they find and how they find it.”

Unsurprisingly, artifacts from Death Valley’s military history turn up from time to time.

“I’ve been out hiking and have found things like 1943 machine gun casings,” Leavitt-Reynolds said. The park, a favorite spot of NASA for testing otherworldly rovers, has served as a training ground for military aircraft maneuvers and a firing range for testing wartime munitions. Most artifacts recovered from this era can be identified by markings from manufacturers, as was the case with the bullet leftovers.

Then there’s the truly odd finds.

While having lunch with members of her team on the side of a mountain without a marked trail in the Greenwater Valley area, Leavitt-Reynolds stumbled on “maybe the quirkiest thing” she’s ever found at Death Valley: “Someone hiked out to that spot and tucked in a silver champagne flute that said ‘Jim’ and had a 1986 date inscribed on it.”

How did it get there? She may never know. But more importantly, her team didn’t take it away.

“I don’t want to make Jim mad,” she laughed. “That’s why we leave stuff. We want these places to be these outside museums where other people can experience the thrill of discovery.”

That’s why a silver champagne flute will forever stay put in the Death Valley desert.