2007 03 Eastern Nevada

2007 03 15 Taylor

Today I spent the entire day in the mill buildings at the "Taylor Project", a mill and mine site that has operated on and off for more than a hundred years. It's about 20 miles south of Ely on the east side of the Spring Valley. As usual with these sorts of places, it is in a beautiful location. The operation here is currently shut down, but there is exploratory drilling going on.

A local bank owns the site, and I assume is trying to sell it. It looks like it was in operation as recently as 12-15 years ago. I got permission to go in from the president of the bank who has a nice dry sense of humor and was quite willing to let me in for as long as I wanted. I talked about with him in his office and he gave me the key and told me not to get shot.

This used to be the owned and operated by the Alta Gold Mine.

It is filled with huge equipment and big airy spaces with fine light. There are 8 large ball mills in the largest building, although the building with all the crushers has absolutely no windows. That was a big disappointment. The space with all the thickening tanks had a lot of great catwalks to climb around on and photograph from. (This is the last two shots.)

I was too tired at the end of the day to shoot much digital. I did shoot a lot of film.

One of my 6x7 camera bodies became extremely balky towards the end of the day and made me grateful that I always have a second with me. That one seemed new by comparison. Both had been serviced by the manufacturer a couple of years ago, but that was a lot of rolls of film ago and the first is just tired again.

Now that I am printing digitally I can see that the time is approaching when I will give up film for all but 6x17 panoramic. The trouble and expense of processing and scanning film is increasing, and the cost of large (25M to 40M pixel) digital backs is falling. It would be a large initial investment but would probably be recovered in about 3 years.

Here is a good overview of mining in White Pine County.