Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Thesis Area Mined!

The Pinson adit, from whence came jasperoid hand samples for my thesis, no longer exists - it was located in the northwest portion of what is now the A Pit of the Pinson Mine, near the bridge area between the A and CX Pits.

North is up in this air-photo image from a recent field trip to Barrick's Pinson Mine; the scale bar is 1000 feet. This digital photo of the paper image shown on the field trip contains some minor distortion due to operator error (mine!). The air-photo appears to be identical to what you can see on Google Earth, with one exception: Google Earth wraps the air-photo image over older topography, which looks strange when you try to view the existing pits using an oblique angle.

The shed or old barn where the samples were stored is likewise no longer in existence. It was located in the main drainage - Granite Creek - north of the combined A and B Pits, possibly about where the trees or shrubs in the creek are still present. In this MSRMaps map, the shed was located about where the old road crossed Granite Creek. The Pinson Pit in the MSRMaps image is the original, 1980's A Pit [from a map dated 7/1/1988 according to my original link]; the smaller-than-now A Pit is where the adit was located. The adit was put in by the Cordex I Syndicate in the early 1970's, prior to my sample collecting in 1976.

While collecting samples, I stayed at the home of Fred and Dorothy Barnes on the site of the then inactive Getchell Mine, in a house that is probably not there anymore. In order to call their house, you had to get an operator to ring Getchell #1 or Getchell #2. From outside Nevada, one of the last states using toll stations or ring downs (into at least the mid 1980's - or early 1990's?), you had to tell the operator to put you through to a Nevada operator. Out-of-state operators generally didn't believe numbers such as Midas #2 and Coaldale #1 still existed, and would insist that you give them an area code and a 7-digit phone number.

2 comments:

Callan Bentley said...

Are you finally revealing your identity with that link to your thesis? :)

Silver Fox said...

Hey there, Callan. Guess you haven't been on twitter recently! Currently I'm not posting any names, the better to confuse google with. :)