2003 07 Nevada, Idaho

Today I really went only two places - I tried to go a third but found "No Trespassing" signs all over and I try to be good about those.  I know how I would feel about it if it was me with the property and the signs.  If it was someplace I really had to get to I would try and reach the owner and get permission.  But the place (the semi-ghost town of Shoshone) did not look that interesting anyway.

Instead I went up to an abandoned mine site called "Hogum".  It's in the Snake Range, overlooking the Spring Valley.  This is the same mountain range containing Great Basin National Park (National Park Service) and is just west of the Utah state line.  This is looking out into the valley from Hogum.  Ely is over those mountains and to the right.

There is an incredible amount of machinery and junk lying around here.  It looks like it was last operated as a small scale hydraulic mine sometime 10-20 years ago.  (Things left out deteriorate so slowly it is hard to tell.)  Hydraulic mining is very destructive.  Large quantities of water (sometimes high pressure) are blasted at a rock face and the resulting slurry of water and rock is filtered and screened many times, and eventually gold chips and flakes can be separated from the rock at the far end of the process.  The mine site is severely scarred where the water blasted it, and where the huge piles of gravel accumulate.  The western slope of the Sierra Nevada contain many sites of enormous hydraulic mines.

Here are some shots of some of the junk lying around as well as the scenery:

The above is one of the "first level" screens.  The tracked contraption is called a "monitor", a high pressure water blaster.  It starts the slurry of rock moving through the series of screens.  I think in this place a bulldozer was used to move rock in front of this initial screen.  Lower down are further "shaker" type screening machines.

The above is the largest screening machine here.

The above looks like a 1930 vintage water pump.  A great big Diesel engine and a large pump.  I am sure this in combination with all the screening machines made a racket that could be heard 20 miles away if the wind was right.

The above is representative of the junk that is lying around everywhere.  It's about 5% of it, and much of it is the remnants of large machines, vehicles, and who knows what all else.  it's hard to tell.  Sometimes I think that when a miner wants to shut down the last thing he does is call the Air Force or the Navy for an air strike.

There were other hydraulic mines around, and you might be wondering where all the water came from - I have not seen it, but I have read that in the late 1800s a 75 mile "pipeline" (an above ground trench, really) was built from Great Basin NP to this site!  Those mountains are 10 to 11 thousand feet and get much more snow that could be collected and piped this way..  I want to find this and really see it.

I also went  to Ward, the mine site I visited a couple of times before and which I have described as being "just walked away from" about 20 years ago.  It was nice to be here and not be freezing.  Last time it was about 20 degrees, this time about 75.  The site looks worse than last time..  The holes in the roof are bigger and more water inside means more destruction.  Here are a few:

This door had been pried open since I was last here.  Having the weather get in won't do the site any good..

Sorry for the blur here - I had to flash it and could not hold the little point and shoot very steady.  You can see the thousands of core samples.  Tens of thousands?  Hundreds of thousands?  There are also countless little bags of powdered samples.

And these very interesting long pieces of plywood with crushed samples glued to them in small sections.  I think this is done by depth.

Here are more of those sample sticks.  Too many to even try to count.  Those boxes are filled with zillions of little packets of crushed ore samples.

More sample storage.

More. 

An incredible amount of work went into drilling all these cores, analyzing them, cataloging them, storing them..  The cores are hard rock too - like granite.  And then this was all abandoned.  It looks like they just walked away from it one day.

I think Nietsche said "Out of chaos comes order."  He's wrong.  "Out of order comes chaos."
 
Last time I was here the road up the mountain was blocked by snow at this point.  This time I went further and took a few snaps from up much higher.  (Cold up there!)

The highest peak in the distance is Wheeler Peak, the highest point in the Great Basin NP.  Beyond that is Utah.

One the way back I took a few shots of clouds.  I am really struck by how discrete they are in the arid west.  They look like big ships floating by, with very clear edges and a real physical presence.  In the east they always blurry blobs at best.