Looking For Detachment

Our goal on Majuba Hill, while driving up the switchback road past the Keep Out sign, was the Middle adit, which is known by some to be the main entrance to mineral collection sites within the mine.

Here we are, ("we" being a very small portion of the ±80-person-strong field trip) standing around the flat area in front of the Middle adit.

A closer view of the mouth of the Middle adit, overhung by talus, and with old rails heading into the old workings.

There's a nice bit of tourmaline breccia just inside the mouth on the right, but it didn't look like a great place to be hammering, and the breccia wasn't very photogenic.

The entrance to the adit is barricaded and posted, not sure by whom.

I stuck my camera lens inside the metal grating and took a natural light photo. The old rails emerge from a rockfall area and continue into the dark distance.

Another photo, taken with the flash, gets us a tiny bit farther into the mine.

I suspect that had the entrance been open, a few geologists with headlamps (and secondary backup lights) would have ventured in!

I found a source for the names of some of the Goldfield, Nevada, headframes I took pictures of a couple years back. These photos first appeared here.

I've been thinking about the ideal location for my own personal evil geologist lair (in case I develop any evil tendencies in the near or far future), and realized, with great sadness, that now that Mt. Shasta has already been taken by Garry Hayes, and because the best beach is already occupied by Jessica Ball, that I'd have to look somewhere else besides volcanoes.

In fact, the only fitting possibilities would be something like a really deep, scary, haunted, open pit like the one in Desperation (Stephen King's novel, Stephen King's film), or (more likely) a nice pleasant underground mine hidden away somewhere in the desert outback, left to me and me alone by the old-timers that dug the mine. One in particular pops into my mind, the Mary-Drinkwater Mine, on Mineral Ridge above Silver Peak, Nevada. Unfortunately, however, that mine, which had beaucoups levels dug into en echelon, low-angle quartz veins, is probably not the same after undergoing open pit mining. So, I'll have to choose another place. (I know where, but ain't tellin'.)

A good underground mine will be in a location not known to anyone else, so I can get away when needed and not be found when being searched out by whomever might be doing the searching (black helicopters have been suggested). It will therefore not only be in an obscure location, but its opening — a typical adit into some hillside either somewhere in Nevada, the Mojave Desert of California, or Idaho (don't ask me why the latter) — while looking like any other adit if you happen to be passing by on the surface, will be absolutely hidden from view from overhead. In fact, it will have multiple openings, as all underground mines should. The main adit opening will look rather uninviting to casual passersby, including most geologists, and would only possibly be entered by the most dedicated of exploration geologists seeking out gold or quartz or hidden structures.

A second opening, way back into the hillside, will provide good ventilation (an air shaft), and will probably be so hidden on the hillside above that not even a scurrying-by pocket monkey or prairie dog will see it.

A third opening will be down a side tunnel, through an open stope that shows indications of incipient caving toward the left, so that most people in the know (underground miners, desert rats, exploration geos) will either avoid the room entirely or will at least skirt it far to the right, where booby traps can be set and sprung if needed. This open stope, once negotiated correctly, will lead into some drifts in solid quartz. Multiple levels will open up from this point, with elevators going up and down between levels, following the old, originally hand dug and now widened, raises. A back exit, only obvious with some digging around and following of anomalous air flows, will allow escape through an active underground mine on the other side of the mountain, where I will be able to exit surreptitiously with all the other miners at shift change.

A fourth opening, the entrance of which will be partially caved so as to look uninviting, will lead past a caved open stope to a hallway of gold-bearing quartz that will impede the approach of even the most dedicated gold-seekers (they will have to stop for samples and won't pass further without taking their sample bags out to a typical mineral exploration pickup, thereby allowing time for any evil denizens of the deep who happen to be present to escape deeper into the mine). Beyond the wall of gold-bearing quartz, a flat-lying metal grizzly made of old mine rail will bar access to the last escape route. If anyone makes it this far into the deeps of the lair, they will not know to press a button inside a panel hidden behind the pile of slabbed, broken waste rock sitting nearby. In fact, they will ignore the waste rock entirely and go for the ore sitting next to the grizzly, large chunks of gold-quartz ore that the old-timers left because it didn't fit through the grizzly.
Meanwhile, the denizen of the lair (that would be me), will be running down the haulage tunnel below the grizzly, heading for its opening in the wash right above the old, hand-built road, an opening now obscured by decades of flash flooding down a steepening canyon. The ATV awaiting me at this exit, will allow me to pass nearly unseen and certainly camouflaged by ordinariness, down the mountain to The Alternative bar, where I will blend in with miners and geologists alike.

One view from a good lair.

And now a little picture break from too much writing: some more headframes, this time from Goldfield, Nevada. You can see some of GF's headframes when driving by on Highway 95, with local dirt roads (some are gated) providing closer access. And, check out the way the town looked in 1909 in this 360° panoramic view.
Goldfield has a gazillion headframes — those metal or wooden contraptions that stand above shafts to underground mines. From this first area near the central part of the main Goldfield mining area, I could look north and see at least four headframes, including #1 on the left above, #2 in the middle distance above, and #3 to the east (below).
Looking back to the south, I could see several, including #4 on the yellowish dumps (below).

After looking at a small dig and wandering through the old buildings near that last headframe, we wandered over to the east, where we found this nice specimen of a headframe on top of a ledgy hill (same as headframe #3 in photo two).
From that alunite ledge, we could look back to the west or southwest and see where we had been earlier. The two tiny-looking headframes are #4 in the distance on the left and #1 toward the middle near all the mill buildings.

A Little Terminology:
Shaft: a vertical or near vertical entrance to an underground mine, which has been sunk from the surface down. The headframe above the shaft provides haulage of the ore and waste to the surface, and access in and out of the mine.

Adit: a horizontal or near horizontal entrance to an underground mine. Sometimes these are inclined slightly upwards going in to provide for water runoff or mine dewatering if needed.

Decline: an entrance that declines downward at a relatively shallow angle, as in a spiral ramp, providing for entrance and exit on foot or by truck, or an entrance that declines at angles greater than 15 degrees or more. With steeper angles, a decline will often have a ladder (yikes!) or some kind of hoisting arrangement as with a shaft. Sometimes declines are called inclined shafts (which I was taught was improper).

Tunnel: a tunnel is similar to an adit, being a horizontal or near horizontal entrance, but to be a tunnel, the passageway must pass through a hill or mountain to the other side. The word has sometimes been used used casually to refer to any kind of underground mine excavation that is tunnel-like in dimension (square to circular in diameter and long in extent), and is sometimes used interchangeably (and improperly) with adit.

Winze

Raise

Common Mining Terms: Mining the Motherlode
Glossary of Mining Terms: Kentucky Coal Education
Mining Glossary: Platinum Today
Mining Terms A-Z: IronMiners.com
Old Mining Terms: Hypo-Theses

While out wandering around in the field - whether for fun, for work, or for both - it is common to come across all kinds of miscellaneous old relics, sometimes including partial to entire ghost towns. Here, I'll just show a few pictures from Leadfield, California, which is in Titus Canyon, on the downhill side of Red Pass, in Death Valley National Monument.
I won't go into the history of the Leadfield mining district in Titus Canyon, CA, except to say that the sign does not give the entire history, and that real copper and lead discoveries were made there in the early 1900's. See links below.
A photo overview of part of the Leadfield town, with colorful grey to pale orange mine dump. I didn't knock around on this dump, so I don't know what was being brought out of the ground, but the grey matches the color of the local limestone.

Death Valley Ghost Towns: National Park Service
Leadfield, California: Ghost Town Explorers
Leadfield, California: Wikipedia
Leadfield Ghost Town: Mojave.net

A classic movie to look for is "Search for the Mother Lode: The Last Great Treasure," in which Charleton Heston gets to play two brothers, one of which is a crazed and crazy gold prospector.

At first, the movie is above ground with great scenery from British Columbia - although I think they are supposed to be in Alaska, if I remember right. They talk of placer gold and placer claims, pronouncing it "play - sir" - maybe that's a Canadian pronunciation, but it’s one I’ve never heard in any gold fields! Later, the movie and action ends up underground, where every thing is dark and dangerous, and where Charleton Heston gets to pronounce the most famous lines of the movie in a rasping Irish accent, “Mr. Dupree.... Stay the hell out of me mine, laddie.”

The movie seemed hilarious when watched with a semi-drunken bunch of thermally altered exploration geologists, partly because the geology or words just didn’t seem quite right. I haven’t watched this movie since about 1982, which is the year it was released, and wouldn't mind seeing it again. Unfortunately, the movie is only available on VHS, though I've heard reports that you can buy a Swedish DVD version. If you buy a new VHS version, it's considered a collector's item, and the price is from $45 to $150 plus. The movie has developed what seems to be a kind of cult following, although it was panned by critics (and geologists!) when it first came out.

The MSHA is set to release its findings tomorrow about the August 6, 2007 Crandall Canyon Mine collapse. It will be interesting to see what they say. A May, 2008 report entitled, Chairman Miller Statement on Findings of Investigation into Crandall Canyon Mine Disaster, by U.S. Representative George Miller (D-Calif), states that MSHA approved a faulty plan for retreat mining.

Retreat mining is a practice used in many coal mines; it involves the pulling of rock pillars as the miners retreat from an open room-and-pillar underground mine area. The pillars are ore; that's why they are pulled. The use of the room-and-pillar underground method, at least in coal mines, leaves more than 50% of the coal in the pillars. That's a lot of ore (coal in this case) to leave behind.

It doesn't matter whether the pillars in an underground mine are in gold ore or in a coal seam: they are there to hold up the mine. Pulling them involves an engineered or planned collapse of the mine section or room from which the pillars are pulled. It is not a mining method to be undertaken lightly or to be undertaken at all by anyone more concerned about profit than for miners' safety.

NIOSH has several links to information about safe use of retreat mining. According to their studies, reasons for failure of the practice wherein so-called "bumps" occur, as were reported at Crandall Canyon [these are actually rock bursts] usually have to do with "relatively thick overburden and extremely rigid strata occurring immediately above and below the mine coalbed" - but also have to do with certain mining practices that they recommend avoiding.