2007 03 Eastern Nevada

2007 03 11 Caselton

This is the Caselton mill site on west side of the mine complex, across from Lincoln County power district.

I was disappointed to find that there were absolutely no windows in the largest structure here. This building contained all the ball mills and separators - a huge collection of machinery. This is a very large mill.

The building housing the evaporators was open and this was interesting. Very strange machines. They take in a wet slurry containing the finely crushed ore and spin it into "vanes", using centrifugal force and powerful vacuums to remove the water.

It was also interesting to find that the contact who gave me access to this site knew the person in Rachel that monitored the Tempiute tungsten mine buildings. Nevada may be a huge place, but once you get away form Las Vegas and Reno there aren't many people in it.

The first two shots here are in the machine shop. There were some beautiful old (a century, more or less) machine tools in this shop.

This is the office. It looks like whoever worked in here just got up and left one day, maybe spending an hour cleaning out the desk and shelves.

This next set of 8 is of the building that housed the crushers. Big noisy machines. The second shot is looking into one of them. Note that the building has no roof and appears to have burned. This is exactly what happened. I was told that a worker was trying to cut a piece of metal or rock out of one of the crushers with a torch and set the rubber belts on fire. The roof was burned off the building, and much of the second story walls. Rather than rebuild the roof and walls and mine put the crushers back in operation with no roof! The mine operated this way for about two decades this way. Being at about 6000 feet would make this chilly work in the winter.

Here's the building from the outside.

These are the evaporators. The white fan shaped things are the blades that spin inside the machine, forcing out water. It was fairly dark in here, and there is a find gray dust on everything. A very monochromatic scene.

This next building was called the "bozo hut" according to my guide, who did work in this mill. This is the building in which reagents were mixed for use in the settling tanks.

The last two shots were grabbed quickly since the sun was going down and I wanted to shoot some film here. These "dunes" are actually a large pile of mill "output" that was saved since it has a high magnesium content. The mill tried to sell it but apparently failed. It's very fine stuff but has been blown exactly like sand dunes.