Things You Find in the Field: Melted Claim Posts

Once upon a time in Nevada, 4-inch diameter, perforated or unperforated PVC pipe could be used as claim posts. Prior to some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, claim posts in Nevada consisted of 4" by 4" by 4' or 5' wooden posts, which even when wormy with holes, were quite heavy to carry on the long claim traverses we sometimes made when staking claims.

By 1993 (possibly as early as 1991) all such PVC posts had to be unperforated and capped to prevent birds from trying to nest in the pipes, then dying when they couldn't get out. In late 2011, removal of PVC posts was mandated in Nevada. Apparently, anyone can pull the old PVC posts out of the ground, but you are required to leave them lying on the ground "immediately adjacent to to the location from which it is removed" (it is otherwise a crime to remove or disturb claim markers and filing papers on public lands).

Most claims in Nevada are now staked with a wooden post "at least 1 1/2 inches by 1 1/2 inches by 4 feet" set 1 foot into the ground. Small posts like these were not allowed in the 1970s and 1980s.

A closer, side view of the melted pipe, showing its originally perforated character.

A brush fire went through this area in July, 2007 (a few photos here). I've seen other melted claim posts from other fires here and there, but this one shows the most extreme melting I've seen so far; the fire must have been relatively hot or slow-moving.

In the morning...

In the morning after I wake up—while I'm drinking my first, second, and maybe third cup of coffee—I often think of things to write for the blog, how to write them, maybe even what pictures to use.

I also think of things to write while I'm on the way to work, bouncing around in the front seat of a pickup truck (actually, the ride is usually pretty smooth and solid, I just thought bouncing just sounded better). A moving truck is not a great place for writing (there is *some* bouncing), especially because all I have is my semi-smart phone; perhaps if I had a tablet...

My thoughts while riding or driving into work typically run along the lines of...well, maybe it's time for some drilling stories...let's see, there was the guy who yelled and threw things when he was mad at his helpers, which was almost all the time. Ugh. Or, there's a story or two floating around about drill rigs brought onto staked claims in order to make a discovery before the company that owned the claims, thereby being able to, hopefully, make claim to at least some of the already staked ground.

And then, once again, I'm back here at my computer, it's early morning, and the briefest hints of coffee are trying to course through my veins, trying to rev my brain. Ideas are at a standstill; I don't get very far...until I'm back on the road and the ideas start popping. Another story, or general story idea, will come into my head: mud and getting stuck stories. Hey, there's one just over that not-so distant hill! It happened not long ago, and, remarkably, I have a few photos for it! And not too much farther down that road and over the next hill or two to the south, there's a mud without stuckness story...and that leads to a more typical claim jumping story...which leads to another claim jumping story out of sight from this road but down a road I was writing about last fall and winter before I got distracted by our recent move.

But then, I'm sure I'm missing something...maybe it's the details...because when these ideas start while I'm on the road (any road will do, me driving or sitting as a passenger, either way), other ideas come in and crowd out and confuse the first ideas, which then sometimes include other people's stories: other accounts with drillers, other encounters with mud, other overstaking problems. Which story to tell? What details to use? And, without a tablet, and even with a small notebook, how will these stories make it from barely incipient idea to fully written account?

One story would be about the driller (and set of helpers?) that got thrown off a job down in the south-central Mojave one spring (I hope it was spring and not summer) for showing up to work drunk and carrying a small flask of whiskey or JD. The driller that came to replace him had an interesting time using one of the two only pay phones in town—and so did I, although I used the other of the two pay phones in town—but the guy that had real problems with the one pay phone, which was sitting there on the corner of Main Street and the cross street that formed the junction that made the town, was one of our claim stakers, who was out there running a soil grid across the claims he was staking. And his problems with the pay phone had something to do with the druggy nature of the town, the drugs being the second main reason for the town, the first reason being the intersection of two sub-major (major in the Mojave) roads.

And so the ideas come and go, just like that, while I'm sitting here in the morning partly coffeed up, glancing constantly at the clock so I won't be late: sometimes the ideas get written down, sometimes they don't. These kinds of stories generally don't have photos to go with them, and the Mojave stories are not likely to have photos any time soon or in any systematic fashion: collecting the photos would take almost as long as the original years of exploration.

And now, with one last chug of ever-so-good nice-and-hot coffee, I leave this post behind and start getting ready for work.

Late Night Ramblings: From Becke Lines to Mining Scams

Poetic. It's not that I'm feeling poetic, but that word came to mind, so I wrote it down.

I've had the jimmy legs while trying to sleep, so I've opened the window a crack and am drinking a cold dPf while writing in my journal. I'm using a headlamp with a red LED - this has the odd effect of giving the shadow of my moving pen a deep turquoise line on the left side (toward the light) and a deep red line on the right side (away from the light and more or less behind my hand). These colors, and their arrangement around the edges of my pen and hand, remind me first of Becke lines, which surround mineral grains immersed in oils or epoxy media. Then - especially when I turn the pages of this spiral journal - they remind me of 3-D glasses, as if I've somehow entered some supra-dimensional movie. I haven't, though, I'm just writing and wondering where the one-day-late snow is, and whether I have the window cracked too far open for comfort.

(The deep turquoise and deep red lines - which may entirely be optical effects inside my eyes, as I can only see them when the pen shadow or journal moves - has the effect of making this red-lit white paper appear pink to orange to occasionally yellow. It's as though my eyes are trying to convince my brain that I'm using ordinary incandescent lighting.)

And that reminds me - didn't some country just recently outlaw incandescent bulbs? (Actually, several have.) If only the other bulbs worked consistently. I try to buy the most expensive ones in hopes that they will turn out to be the best ones. Hopefully there is enough "byproduct"mercury from the gold mines of the world so we won't have to go back to mining mercury at mercury mines - such as the ones in Spain and Slovenia (Almadén, Idrija) and the ones in the Coast Ranges of California (New Almadén, New Idria). Seeing liquid mercury drip from old trench and pit exposures is something I'd rather not see every day. And, likewise, running across old-looking but still-in-use jars of mercury used for gold extraction by old-timers - whether in some out-of-the-way prospect north of Napa Valley or down some dusty dirt road in the Mojave Desert - is not something I like to come upon unawares or unexpectedly.

The old-timers in question (some of them are still around, perhaps?) are always quite casual about showing you their gold-rich mercury, and they are equally casual about showing you their dusty, disorganized assay labs out in the middle of nowhere. Jars, bottles, and tools of all sorts are scattered on old wooden work benches built against walls - these are their lab tables. From one etched, north-facing window, you have a nice view of the creosote desert and rocky granitic mountains. Want to have lunch in here? (I think not.) And is that an ice chest I see over near the doorway to the main cabin? Yes, the garage-shed assay-lab is attached to the living area of this old field shack. Too many rusted and broken parts, too much dust, and too many old and unknown lab chemicals are lying around loose.

Where did you say you're getting the gold from? Those pinkish brown, fractured granites over there, the ones with the narrow seams of goethitic iron-oxides in either brown carbonate or microcrystalline silica? Veins, you call them? I think I'd be being generous if I called them veinlets. Okay, we'll high-grade just those tiny veinlets, and then we'll see. We'll get back to you after our commercial lab does its thing. (No, you can't do the assays for us. We're already thinking that you got the gold the same place you bought the mercury - maybe in some old Mother Lode mining town?) Maybe we'll be back, and maybe we won't - but no, we won't be looking at your lab anymore, no matter how proud you are of it.

Not to be disparaging about your claims, but though the ankeritic-goethitic veinlets are interesting, they look too narrow and mostly too far apart to be likely to carry the barren granite they're cutting. (Although it's true, they could indicate something at depth, or something underneath that shallow alluvium just over there, right off your claims. But don't worry, we'll still want to lease your claims - if there is anything we want to come back to after we see some real assay numbers.)

(Besides which, old Joe up the road apiece - quite apiece at that - warned us that you were running some kind of scam down here. But maybe he just wants us to lease his claims, not yours. So, we'll see.)

And who was I with, down there in the east-central Mojave? Seems it was in the same area where a small gold mine was operating - the mine that routinely over-loaded their blast holes such that the metal roof of their mine office had dents and holes from large rocks that fell out of the sky every day, rocks blasted out of their small open pit. We ate lunch near the buses, that field trip day, then drove an entire mile away to avoid the coming bombardment.

I don't know what year it was. The location suggests to me that I was there with either PB or NJ - although the sampling part could have been a joint effort with BS and an assistant of his - except I don't think we worked that area with double partners. So the answer may be forever lost in the dirt and dust of that messy lab or in the steep and rocky slopes two canyons over.

Could I find that mine shack again? Maybe. I have a geographic location tucked firmly away in my head - it's a little SSW of that small gold mine, down some wide southerly-heading dirt road, generally SE of that broad, alluvial-choked peak, and in some vague area between or amongst two north-south-trending ranges. Besides which, unless it was on a tiny piece of private land, it's probably gone.

From 12Nov09, 9:33pm

Mountain Mahogany and Rhyolite

The mountain mahogony, this particular one first seen here, is a wonderful tree common at higher elevations in Nevada and other parts of the intermountain west, often in areas just below tree line. It's plant-association range in Nevada is from the upper sagebrush zone into the piñon-juniper zone to just below tree line, sometimes with limber pine and other high-elevation trees. Elevation range in Nevada is commonly from 1200 to 2700 m (3900 to 8850 ft), but it can be found as high as 3050 m (10,000 ft).

I first really noticed mountain mahogany while working out in the field one summer in the Deer Lodge or Stateline mining district, a silver-gold district located on the Nevada-Utah state line, due east of Pioche. At Stateline, silver and gold occur in quartz veins in Tertiary volcanic rocks - rhyolite and andesite - and particular quartz veins in the area contained the first chlorargyrite I ever saw in real life, outside a mineral collections or museums. Chlorargyrite, sometimes called cerargyrite, is a somewhat rare silver-chloride mineral formed through supergene processes.

It was still early in the summer when we arrived, having moved north from our previous camp south of Caliente. A crew-leader had already found some uranium and the company had already staked a small number of claims. I was briefly involved in the claim staking, which meant I was running lines in rocky terrain through dense underbrush that was composed mainly of mountain mahogany bushes and trees, although I didn't know it at the time because I was so involved in keeping the lines straight with Brunton compass foresights and backsights. Later, a real claim staking crew came in and re-surveyed our claims while staking more.

The uranium occurence was found from the air, by helicopter, using a spectrometer that measured U, Th, K, and total counts. The occurrence was centered on one claim owned by an individual prospector, with the anomalous uranium contained in a mysterious high-level, quartz-eye rhyolite intruding a Tertiary volcanic pile of ash-flow tuffs and flow-dome complexes. The intrusive was limited in its known surface extent, and we wanted to find more of it.

We set about geologic mapping, four young geologists driving to the property from camp every day in one half-ton, four-wheel-drive pickup, over rocky dirt roads that made our front-seat crowding almost unbearable. Sometimes we could get a Las Vegas rock-and-roll radio station part way up the mountain for driving entertainment, sometimes not.

The mountain mahoganies were concentrated especially on a northwest- to north-trending ridge line just barely inside the Nevada border. I especially remember the long, north-trending part of the ridge, where the patches of mountain mahogany seemed especially dense, and where the ridge was underlain by flow-banded rhyolite weathering into thin, shaly-looking chips.

I walked up and down and across that ridge numerous times, around and under many scrubby to standing-tall mountain mahoganies, over and across outcrops and subcrops of pinkish rhyolite. I developed an association between the scent of mountain mahogany - distinctive everywhere across its range - and flow-banded rhyolite. For years, anytime I would catch that scent on the wind, especially on hot summer days, I'd automatically start looking for rhyolite. I wonder if the same thing would happen now, if I went back to the source of the association, back to that long ridge high above Deer Lodge Canyon.

Some References:
Stotebury, H. W., 1921, Report on the Stateline Mining District, Iron Co., Utah, Lincoln, Co., Nevada: scanned by Nevada Bureua of Mines and Geology, 9 pages.

The Uranium Occurrence:
260. Peak claims (nos. 1-1 2)
Location: T. 1 N., R. 71 E.; near the summit of the high peak at the head of Deer Lodge Canyon.
Development: Bulldozer cuts.
Radioactivity: Background = 0.02 mR/hr.; High = 0.20 mR/hr. One sample contained 0.58 percent cU30s (but only 0.12 percent eU308).
Geology: Autunite and torbernite occur in 1- to 2-inch siliceous stringers in a white to gray rhyolite flow. Some iron-oxide staining [hematite] is present.
References: U. S. Atomic Energy Comm. Prelim. Reconn. Rept. 3535; Tschanz and Pampeyan, 1969.

from Garside, L. J., 1973, Radioactive mineral occurrences in Nevada: Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology Bull. 81, page 73.

More Deer Lodge Photos

One Year

Well, I have been working in this neck of the woods for about a year, now. It's the first time I've worked at a mine in my decades-long career, and now it's already been a year. My how the time flies. Prior to this, I've mostly been in exploration.

In the past 5 years, I have worked some around the peripheries of mines, I have worked in onsite facilities where active mining was about to begin, and I have worked in offsite facilities where active mining was in progress.

Prior to these last 5 years (and maybe about 50% of the last 5 years), I spent most of my time in the field, conducting raw (grass-roots) to district-based reconnaissance, choosing which areas to go look at, which areas to stake or acquire, and which properties once acquired and mapped to take to the first stage of drilling. I've been fortunate enough to see some properties go beyond round-one of drilling, and have seen two go into production. In doing so, I've worked in every state in the west except for Montana and Wyoming.

There is a difference between working in the exploration end of things - reconnaissance, property evaluation and acquisition, and early-stage property mapping and drilling - and working in the production end of things - pre-development drilling and evaluation, development drilling and evaluation, and what is sometimes called "production logging." For one thing, at least so far, there is a lot less actual field work involved. I'm "in the field" in the sense of being away from home, but much of my work is done in an office, coreshed, or warehouse-typesetting. The mine geologist at a mine - and his crew if he has one - usually does most or all of the mapping inside a mine, whether it be underground mapping or pit mapping. I am not a mine geologist, and I've never been a mine geologist.

One thing that I'm not sure that everyone fully appreciates is the extent to which companies in industry expect confidentiality. At most companies, whether working as a full-time company employee or as a consultant, one is required to sign a confidentiality agreement. Most agreements require that knowledge and information gained while working is to remain confidential for one year after leaving a company.

I was once half-heartedly accused of breaching a confidentiality agreement. Just before I left Northern Exploration Company (NEC) for Former Mining Company (FORMINCO), I had completed a list of volcanic-hosted recon targets for the Mojave Desert of California, and I hadn't had time to look at all of them. Another NEC employee also left for FORMINCO at the same time.

Within a year, while I was off doing recon in the Coast Ranges of California, the other geologist had come up with his own recon list for the Mojave - and lo-and-behold: by pure coincidence, one of the targets was the same as one I had chosen the year before. After all, how many volcanic-hosted gold recon targets can a person come up with in the Mojave? The list is potentially huge, but some districts will be more obvious and will rate higher, no matter who is doing the prioritizing.

The clincher was, the other geologist at Former Mining Company staked a large claim block, one that completely surrounded a small claim block that NEC had staked in one corner of that particular mining district. My former boss from NEC gave me a little hell the next time he saw me, but he finally understood that I had nothing to do with staking those particular claims or generating the area as a recon target, although I did end up helping to map the area.