The Middle Adit at Majuba Hill

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!

The Road to Majuba: Keep Out Sign

Keep Out. Stay Out. 

The signs are a bit old, left over from a previous exploration company, Minterra Resources Corp, a company that no longer exists. By the time we reached this location on the switchbacks up to the Middle Adit, we had possibly passed a locked gate that had been opened by a field trip leader or rep from Max Resource Corp, the current owner/lessor. I'm not, however, positive that there was a locked gate: on the three day trip, we went through at least two or three locked gates, and I'm just not sure about the road to Majuba Hill.

The location below is shown on the most likely switchback.

The Road to Majuba: The First Stop

The first stop on the second field trip day: RR xing in Imlay.

Same shot, looks too yellow and too saturated on my new computer.

I'm wondering how the two photos compare on other computers. On my new Thinkpad 440S with Windows 8.1, all the photos I enhance on the old computer — where I still have the programs I like to use until I get everything set up over here in the 8.1 world — look too saturated and too yellowish or greenish until I modify them with the new Photos app, a strange contraption of a program that works alright with a touchscreen. Any opinions?

Going to Majuba Hill Soon!

MOH and I will shortly be off on a field trip to a few nearby localities, including Majuba Hill, reportedly a great mineral and rock collecting site, seen here from I-80 looking northwest across Rye Patch Reservoir.

I might try posting from the field with pictures from my phone, but phone photos post at a size slightly too large for my blog styling, and they definitely are not as good as pictures I'll be taking with my camera. So we'll see if I try this somewhat time consuming activity.

Majuba Hill, besides having a wide range of economic elements including copper, tin, and uranium (I also hear there may be gold and silver), has been exposed to several intrusive events, and several varieties of breccia have been recognized. Read more here.

Selected Reference
Trites, A.F., Jr., and Thurston, R.H. (1958), Geology of Majuba Hill, Pershing County, Nevada, USGS Bulletin 1046-I: 183-203.