Hikers find half-century-old beer buried in desert

When hikers in California saw an old can sticking out of the desert sand, they were initially unaware of the discovery they?d made.

"We were curious, dug down a little deeper and couldn't believe what we found,? says Jeff Barnes, one of the hikers. What they found was a collection of tin cans of Coors Beer, a half-century old and never opened. They looked up, and there, a few hundred feet away were railroad tracks. It all began to make a little more sense.

Twisting through the mountains near Jacumba are the tracks of what's now called the Carrizo Gorge Railway. Fifty years ago, it was the San Diego and Arizona Eastern, when two cars derailed and went over the side. On one of them was a truck of Coors Beer. The wreckage remains even today, but all the beer was collected.

Or so everyone thought.

"Yeah. Some of these are full of beer," says Barnes. "This one still has beer in it, and we've always wondered what it would be like if we opened it." It's a fair question. Heat tortured and winter frozen for almost fifty years before they found it, what could it be like? As the attached video reveals, the beer is the color of cough syrup and smells like a combination of fermented wine and dirt. The rest of the cans will remain unopened.

The tracks are strictly off limits now, guarded by railroad and Homeland Security. These cans are among the last remaining traces of what hikers and rail fans call the "Coors Wreck," a little-known bit of high desert history about San Diego.