Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Coaldale, Black Rock, Lone Mountain, and the Boss Mine

Onward! Onward! How far will we get this time?

Coaldale, as seen in August, 2010.

With Boundary Peak still in view, MOH and I rounded the corner at Coaldale Junction, and pulled in briefly at Coaldale. This particular ghost town, which was first a small mining town and later a roadside waystation with a tiny population, holds a few minor memories for me, dating back to my early days at Northern Exploration Company in the late 70s and early 80s. For some reason, it always seems like a depressing place to stop, and I can rarely bring myself to take a photograph or to get out of my vehicle to take a close look. This time was no different, so I've uploaded a photo I shot back in 2010.

A few miles on, we pulled in at Black Rock, a spot which may originally have been just a little prospect pit in some black chert of the Ordovician Palmetto Formation, but which is now a semi-convenient place to stretch your legs (although it doesn't really offer much cover as a pit stop, and the Millers rest area and the town of Tonopah aren't too much farther down the road).

Coming to Black Rock from the west, Google Street View.

Lone Mountain as seen from Black Rock, looking ESE.

From the south side of Black Rock, we had a good view of Lone Mountain beyond the playa and salt flat of the southwestern end of Big Smoky Valley. A tiny bit of the Weepah Hills is in shadow off to the right (west).

A closer view of the southwest to northwest side of Lone Mountain.

In this photo, the lighter colored rock formation toward the right (west) is the ЄpЄ Reed Dolomite, which, as I noted earlier, is usually listed as Precambrian or Precambrian to Cambrian, and sometimes as Cambrian only. Here it's on top of a thin, dark section of Precambrian Wyman Formation. Underneath the Wyman, and to the left (east), the Cretaceous Lone Mountain pluton forms the bulk of Lone Mountain.

A couple ways in which the Cretaceous may have intruded the Precambrian so sharply and neatly are developed by Maldonado (1984) in the explanation of his map of the Lone Mountain area. I personally think the contact is structural: a low-angle fault (detachment, anyone?), and, in fact, the area is noted as being part of the Silver Peak-Lone Mountain detachment system (Oldow et al, 1994) or Silver Peak-Lone Mountain extensional (or core) complex (Oldow et al, 2009). Also, this map shows the contact as a detachment fault  (Hulen, 2008, between pages 4 and 5). In the few places that I've seen the Wyman-pluton contact on Lone Mountain, I've noted shearing, faulting, or other complexities—and along the north and west side of Lone Mountain, the top of the pluton looks somewhat planar from a distance, and other planar features (jointing?) are apparent from some angles. If you're driving by, a good place to pull off to see these planar features (I'm really not sure what they are) is at the turnoff to the dirt road going to the northern Gilbert mining district a few miles east of Black Rock  (Google Maps location).

Google Earth image from the perspective of between Black Rock and the turnoff to the northern Gilbert district, and up in the air a bit.

Approximate mapped contacts of the three major rock formations, from Maldonado, 1984.

The same image with a few pink lines added.

I'm not sure what the pink lines represent, other than that they are supposedly entirely within the Lone Mountain pluton. They may be joints in the pluton; they may be Tertiary lamprophyre dikes, as on the 1984 map. Another possibility is that the intrusive-sedimentary contact is mixed, like it is on Mineral Ridge, where Wyman and intrusive rock alternate near or just below the detachment fault (or detachment faults). Or maybe all three possibilities come into play. These are just a few ideas to take with you if you happen to go hiking in the area.

Turning back toward the highway, I stumbled across a few interesting rocks.

Breccia.

The rock is a veined and brecciated chunk of Ordovician Palmetto Formation—chert or siliceous mudstone to siltstone. While walking around, I wondered what the remnant of an old mine dump was all about. Maybe this rock holds a clue.

Here's a zoomed in view of the same rock, focusing in on the quartz vein right and center.

The quartz vein contains brown blades of a relict mineral that has now gone to iron-oxide and silica. Possibly the mineral was calcite, and if so, the resulting mineral or texture is often referred to as "bladed quartz" or "bladed quartz after calcite," or more properly, "quartz [or silica] after bladed calcite." The texture can be indicative that you're in the right part of an epithermal system to find an economic gold or silver deposit. Most of the quartz after calcite I've seen has been crystalline; this silica is microcrystalline.

In fact, several smallish gold deposits have been found in the immediate area, and one has been mined (so far only one deposit has been considered economic).

The Boss mine, a small gold deposit mined in the late 1980s, can be seen just across the road from Black Rock.

A zoomed-in view of the open pit area of the Boss mine.

The Boss produced about 32,000 ounces of gold from 600,000 tons of ore (Diner and Strachan, 1994). That would mean the ore grade was about 0.053 ounces Au per ton (o.p.t). The other deposits, including the Black Rock zone, are described here and here, along with the geology of the Boss mining area. Gold is reported to occur mostly in both Tertiary rhyolites and andesites.

And that will be it for today!

Location map

Related Posts (in order of posting):
Death Valley, "Super" Blooms, Turtlebacks, and Detachments
Death Valley Trip, Part 2: More of the Badwater Turtleback Fault
Death Valley Trip, Part 3: Northward, and over Daylight Pass
Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Wave Clouds beyond the Sierra
Death Valley Trip, Getting There: A Hike to Pleistocene Shorelines

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Walker Lake, Road Stories, A Bit about Copper, and Some Folds near Luning

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: A Jeep Trail, Folds and Cartoons of Folds, Even More Folds, and Boundary Peak

Death Valley Trip, Getting There: Highway 95, Redlich, Columbus Salt Marsh, and Another View of Boundary Peak

Selected References:
Diner, Y., and Strachan, D.G., 1994, Geology of the Boss mining area, Gilbert district, Esmeralda County, Nevada: Econ. Geology v. 89, no. 5, p. 1176-1182.

Hulen, J.B., 2008, Geology and conceptual modeling of the Silver Peak geothermal prospect, Esmeralda County, Nevada: unpublished report for Sierra Geothermal Power Corporation, 23 p.

Maldonado, Florian, 1984, Bedrock geologic map of the Lone Mountain pluton area, Esmeralda County, Nevada: U.S. Geological Survey Map I-1533, 1:24,000.

Oldow, J.S., Elias, E.A., Ferranti, Luigi, McClelland, W.C., and McIntosh, W.C., 2009, Late Miocene to Pliocene synextensional deposition in fault-bounded basins within the upper plate of the western Silver Peak–Lone Mountain extensional complex, west-central Nevada: Geological Soc. America Special Papers 447, p. 275-312.

Oldow, J.S., Kohler, Gretchen, and Donelick, R.A., 1994, Late Cenozoic extensional transfer in the Walker Lane strike-slip belt, Nevada: Geology v. 22, no. 7, p. 637-640.

Strachan, D.G., 1988, Economic geology and exploration potential of the South Boss prospect, Boss gold mine, Esmeralda County, Nevada: unpublished report on file at Nevada Bur. Mines and Geology, 11 p. and notes.