2003 02 Nevada

Today was another very good day.  Again it was not what I expected, but that is part of what makes these photo trips so good and so productive.  I can put myself in an area that I know is very rich in material, but I won't know exactly what it is that will be "happening", or really be there at all, for that matter, if I have never been there before.  Of course there are a great many locations that I will go back to over and over, knowing the best time to get a certain shot and what it will probably look like.  But in a new area I am always surprised.

The weather droids had predicted today would start mostly sunny in the morning but yield to snow showers.  I got up at 5:15, and it was mostly clear.  As the sun came up it was very clear, and it stayed that way.  Some puffy clouds developed over the mountains as the day went on, but for the most part it was brilliantly sunny.  Very nice in the sun .. almost (almost!) shorts time.  (But later when the sun went down it was very cold.)  So the weather droids were just wrong..

Since it was so sunny I thought I would go try and put myself in a place that would give me some nice panoramic shots of snowy mountains and sun. I went east thinking I would just stop at the east edge of one of the two valleys between here and Utah and shoot west.  Well, this never really happened.  The sunrise just was not that interesting.  Not enough cloud and I was not in the right place at the right time.  So I kept going over the second range and visited the Great Basin NP just so I could say I had been there.  Here is a shot of Wheeler Peak from the east.

It's the highest peak, 13063 ft.  The park is closed to vehicles at about 7500 feet but open to hiking and snowshoes.  Last year I was chased out of the Bristlecone Pines by bugs.  They are up around 10000 feet.

So, this was a nice drive but not much for pictures.  I did take some panoramics of some sort of sinister looking clouded mountains to the north of here.

After this I went back to the other side of Wheeler Peak and back to Osceola, since I thought it would be cool to see all those structures in bright sun. Here are a couple:

 

I did quite a bit up here and then went on to the one new place for today, another mine site, Ward.  It's fairly close to Ely, on the east side of the Egan Range.  (The Egan Range contains the pass in which Ely sits.  To the east is the Steptoe Valley, then the Schell Creek Range, then the Spring Valley, then the Snake Range, which contains the Great Basin NP.)

I did not know what to expect at Ward, perhaps another abandoned set of mines from the 1800s.  I did not completely explore this area, but the one abandoned mine I did explore looks like it was operating into the 70s!  It all looked relatively new, yet completely abandoned.  Here it is:

The smaller metal building is all storage.  The larger contains offices, labs, workrooms, and a lot of storage space.  The mine shaft in the last picture is large and scary.  No barbed wire.  The outer 30 feet have collapsed already, but one could just walk in.. I didn't.  I can see that there is a lot of mining activity further into the mountains but looking at that will have to wait until the next trip.

Looking through these two buildings was not like looking at ruins from the 1800s, or even the more recent junk at Osceola.  In these buildings I got the distinct impression that not too long ago someone walked in while many people were working away, and just said, OK, that's it, we're out of business.  And then everyone literally dropped what they were doing and left.  The two metal buildings are filled with neatly stacked core samples, small envelopes of powdered rock, other small samples, paperwork.. it's just relaly weird to see all this very elaborate and methodical work just abandoned.  I guess the big difference between what went on in these two buildings and the work I have "seen" elsewhere is that this was all exploration, and not actual production mining.  

Here's what is inside the small building:

There were also boxes and boxes of small brown envelopes with powdered ore samples.  All of this stuff is marked, had been stored very neatly, and was just so elaborate..  spooky to see it all left.  

Here's some shots of the interior of the larger building:

 

The long flat boxes contain core samples.  There must have been thousands or tens of thousands of them.  You can see that the larger building was the place that core samples were examined for gold, silver, whatever.  There was paperwork all over filled with detailed information on them.  The roof has falled in on one end of the larger building.  You can see the snow.

It's hard to describe what it was like to walk around in all this.  It's obvious nobody has worked here in a long time, but it all looks like it was abandoned a few months ago, and some vandals got in and trashed the place.  But what's amazing is that it is still standing at all.  I think that is only because it is a long long way from anywhere that there are many people.  It was just weird to see all this.  It's very easy to imagine 10 or 20 people working away in this building.  I did not show it in these photos, but a great many of the stored cores and other samples are still very neat, looking exactly like they did when they were stacked.

Anyway, I did a lot of photography of all of this, and it was all interesting.  There was also a lot of junk lying around outside.  Here are a couple shots:

The first picture of the preceding three is a large twin diesel motor generator that is just sitting out rusting (rusted) into a solid block.  You might wonder what the second of the three is .. I do too.. I stepped in the gunk in the foreground, and it has the consistency of Gummi Bears.  (It is below freezing.) And it looks like it has been there a long time.  Who knows what sort of toxic crud it might be?  The third of the three seems to summarize a lot of my thoughts about Nevada. It's a gorgeous scene, looking across a long flat sage covered valley to beautiful mountains in the background.  In fact that is Wheeler Peak, the snow covered peak visible way in the distance over two valleys and an intervening mountain range.  Oh, but what's that in the foreground?  It's an abandoned and very large and no doubt full of PCBs power transformer.. just sitting there until it rusts apart .. I guess..

So I guess that's all.  I don't think I have conveyed how surreal it felt to wander around here.  I would like to come back in slightly warmer weather and explore further up the mountain where it was clear there was a lot more to check out.  It was C O L D up here today, especially after the sun went behind the mountain.

I did get some panoramic shots of Wheeler Peak at sunset, and here is a digital shot that is similar.  For those of you that like sunsets.

I am out of here very early tomorrow and will probably be in Fallon tomorrow night..  will be driving US 50 ..