2003 02 Nevada

I had planned on doing a couple of things today but wound up spending essentially the entire day at one place, the mine site at Osceola.  This is about 30 miles east of Ely on highway 6/50.  It is on the west side of the Snake Range, which is the mountain range that contains the Great Basin National Park. Great Basin National Park (National Park Service)  It's almost in Utah.  It was a short drive, and I went with low expectations.  A lot of these mine sites are just a few bits of timber and assorted junk scattered across the sage, but this was much more impressive.  The remains of two defunct mines are still largely in place, there is what appears to be some sort of current mining operation, and there is what is left of the community.

On the way to this site I first went to the top of the pass just to see what I could see:

That line in the valley is US 6/50 looking west.  Ely is on the other side of those mountains and north.

The first thing I get to at the mine site is what is left of the settlement.  I did not take a digital snap of the only really old stone building still standing, which makes me want to kick myself.  It's the shell of what must have been an elaborate little stone house.  There is "newer" stuff though, mostly falling apart.  A few people live up here.  I ran into someone's dog, but not the someone.  There were a couple of permanently parked trailers and assorted cars in addition to all this:

Those two pictures do not really make it clear how much rusting junk is lying around in the sage:

 

Check the name on this cabin.  Perhaps this was the humble beginning of something big.

After wandering around in all the rubble (There is a lot of rubble and rusting machinery - I have a lot more photos but won't include them.) for a while I went down the hill a little to the remains of the old mines.  On the way you pass a small cemetery Many of the plots are just a ragged rectangle of stones now, but some of the headstones are legible.

A surprising number of the stones in this cemetery were for children that died at a few months of age.  This is at about 7500 feet, or maybe more, and the winters here are harsh.  Life in the 1800s was not easy.

So here is the first mine.  This is the older of the two abandoned mines.

The first of the three above pictures is some sort of ore chute.  It is below the head frame of the mine.  The second is the headframe and what I guess is the winch house for the mine.  The third picture is looking down the shaft that is at the base of the head frame.  There are (were) rails that went down the diagonal.  Ore cars were filled and dragged up the angled rails and dumped out.  The view down the shaft was taken from the base of the diagonal tracks. You have to ask yourself:  "Would I go down there for anything?"  I'd stick to ranching, myself.

I think the above mine was abandoned and a new mine was dug not far away, with more modern machinery. Here's that one.

The first two of these 4 images show the mine head frame and winch house.  The third is the giant winch inside the winch house.  The motor is missing.  The last of the four is looking down the even scarier mine shaft.  This one had barbed wire around it, although it did not look very imposing.  It gave me the creeps to even look down this from inside the head frame to take the picture.

I took a lot of photos of both mines and all the abandoned buildings and vehicles and assorted trash at the "settlement" site.  (I guess this is what happens when those CC&R's get ignored.)  I think I got some cool stuff, but I'll know when I see it.  I hope.

I also encountered the world's largest piece of steel wool:

I really think this is a manufactured product, and not some sort of weird machine shop waste.  The "wire wool" strands were all identical and it was very compact and heavy.  Maybe for cleaning the world's largest pan after you make 5000 pieces of bacon at once.

Here is another web site on the Great Basin: Great Basin News Front Page

Tomorrow I am going to check out another mine site near here (Ward Mountain) and I hope take some panoramics of the moutains if the light is good. The snow on all these mountain ranges is really quite nice.