2003 07 Nevada, Idaho

This is what the location looks like:

Great Basin National Park is in the mountains in the distance in the above photo, and Utah is beyond that.

These roadcuts can be very interesting and abstract when viewed up close and the surroundings are edited out.

After that I went to a new place, the ghost town of Hamilton.  It is about 50 miles east of this road cut and about 10 miles off 50 on a decent dirt road.  I tried to go to this ghost town last February but the road was impassible due to snow about 2 miles off 50.  This is a very interesting town.  It got going back in the 1860s and has come and gone a few times since.  I think the most recent activity was about 20 years ago when someone thought it was worthwhile to do reprocessing of the tailings from previous mining.  More about that later.  I think at one time there were close to 10,000 people living up here.  I believe that only lasted one winter, as this is at about 8000 feet.  Still, it was a substantial real town, and was the county seat for White Pine county for some time.  Shops, stores, bars, a few thousand people..  Some of the old brick and stone buildings are partially standing.  It is weird to be walking among all this ruin thinking that this or that building used to be someone's store or home or whatever, and now it is just being eaten by the sage.

Here are a few shots of the older buildings:

The above looks like it used to be a store or some sort of commercial building.  It's pretty solid and what is left will be around for quite a while.  I think the only real threat is earthquakes.

Again some sort of commercial structure, possibly the bank.  I read that the bank was still partially standing but I could not tell if it was this building or the next.  One thing that is interesting about this one is that the foundation of the building is made of local sandstone, and it is completely "delaminating" .. it is coming apart into very thin sheets!  You can see this happening in the walls and the litter of shards in what used to be the basement are all delaminated sandstone.  It is all very cool colors in the sun too.  I took a lot of shots here.  The shards are all yellow and blue and gray and purple.  I don't think this sandstone would meet any modern building codes, especially in earthquake country, which this definitely is.

You can see the stone coming apart in the above.

I think the above was a residence.

There are a lot of other less substantial wood and stone structures all over the place, and mostly all organized in rectangles that used to be city blocks.  It's weird.  There are a lot of rectangular holes in the ground filled with what is left of the structure that used to sit above these basements.  Everything is transient..

Here are a couple of shots of some of the actual milling equipment that was in operation out here.  It's just rusting now.

It is hard to convey how large and heavy these mill pieces are.  I wonder how they were moved to the site.  The building in back is one remnant of the most recent activity at the site.  Again it looks like one of these places that was just walked away from at a certain point.  The interior is filled with trash and machine parts and storage containers.

Here are some more remnants of the most recent activity here.

If you can't read the labels on these barrels I'll tell you:  Sodium Cyanide.  And there are a lot of these barrels lying around everywhere, along with empty and partially full leach ponds full of water.  One "modern" mining method is to process old mine tailings with cyanide to leach out the remaining gold.  The cyanide laced water is then just sort of put someplace.  You hope not too near your well.  The large tanks and tubs in the photo above this last were used to do this leaching.  (It is not a coincidence that Nevada is first among 50 states in discharge of toxic pollutants, and hard rock mining is the worst offender.)  It is also interesting in the first of the last two photos that the wood tanks in the right of the photo appear very old but have PVC pipes fitted to them.  I think they were recently used but recycled from some previous mining existence.

All in all this was a very cool site and I shot a lot of film here.  On the way out you can visit the cemetery.

This cemetery looks like it does get a little attention once in a greta while.  Some of the stones are worn to illegibility and the sites almost disappeared into the sage, but others are neater.  Reading the dates on the stones gives you the impression that life was tough up here.

On the way out there is a very nice high ridge line that the road runs along, and you get a great view to the west.  Here are a couple of the sunset.

Rain was falling beyond that second ridge, and the sun was coming through it.  This was quite nice to watch develop and pass to the north.  That is the Newark Valley to the west, and you can see a very long way from up here. This would be a good place to reliably get nice sunsets since it is so high up and there is a nice row of mountains marching off to the west.

That's all for Sunday.  It was a long day.  I did not get back to Ely until almost 10PM.