Rock Walls at the Champion Mine Lower Workings

We had just started up the hill to the lower workings of the Champion Mine in the Rochester mining district, Nevada.

Three rock walls.

The lower workings are a mess of mine dumps, scattered junk, and locally heavy brush amidst three well-defined rock walls below a cliff of Rochester Rhyolite.

Corner of the lower of the three walls.

The rock walls are built of dumortierite-sericite schist from outcrops of the Triassic Rochester Rhyolite, part of the larger Koipato Group of Triassic volcanic and volcaniclastic rocks. I'm guessing that the walls were possibly used to provide flat places for mining activities near the workings on the very steep slopes, rather than as foundations for shelters, buildings, or mills: we found no signs of such structures.

View from the lower wall, looking WSW down Rolands Canyon.

The second or middle wall as seen from below.

The third or upper wall, medium brown in the upper left of the photo.

Standing on the second wall, the third, or upper wall becomes apparent, high on the slope, nearly blending into the cliffy outcrops of Rochester Rhyolite. The funny, corrugated, white to beige or orange-brown outcrop at the far end of the flat platform contains dumortierite in fibrous masses, which we'll see in a later post.

View from the upper or third wall, with the first and second walls below.
My jeep is no longer visible.

Now we've gone back to the bottom of the hill, and are looking straight upward at all three walls.

From just above the jeep parking location, only the first and second walls can be seen.

But, before we had made it all the way back to the parking area to drive away toward continued adventures, MOH and I had turned and walked up the very old, impassable road to briefly investigate the upper workings.

To be continued...

The Road to the Champion Mine

We came in from the east or north, depending on how you view the direction of I-80 as it traverses the entire north-south length of the west flank of the Humboldt Range from Florida Canyon to Limerick Canyon northeast of Lovelock.

The Oreana–Rochester exit from the north on I-80.

We took Exit 119, turning off onto the Oreana–Rochester road, a paved road that goes up Limerick Canyon to Spring Valley Pass and the turnoff to the Coeur Rochester Mine.

The I-80 underpass near Oreana.

Go straight ahead, under the underpass, do not turn left back onto the freeway, unless you'd prefer to go to Rye Patch or points north.

The junction of the Limerick Canyon and Rochester Canyon roads.

To get to the Champion Mine, stay left at this junction, on the paved Limerick Canyon road. Don't take the dirt road to the right, which goes to Rochester Canyon. After the junction, you will take the first dirt road to the left, a fairly decent alluvial fan road. The right turn onto the road to the Champion Mine is marked below in my newly added location section, above the blog tags or labels (if clicked, the location will open in Google Maps).

No trespassing sign.

The dirt road up Rolands Canyon to the Champion Mine is a narrow, high clearance road with lousy turnouts in case you happen to meet someone coming up or down. You'll pass a small No Trespassing sign, which is there because of the spring and an old, not presently used (AFAIK) trailer at the cottonwood tree.

Rolands Canyon should be Rowlands Canyon, named after R. H. Rowland, who had some claims in the area of the Humboldt Queen Mine and Humboldt Queen Canyon back in the 1920's (NBMG Bull. 8, p. 10). Humboldt Queen Canyon is not named on topo maps of the area, but lies between Rolands Canyon and Limerick Canyon (MSRMaps location; USGS TNM Viewer topo).

We took a little side road to the Humboldt Queen, which gave us this view of the spring...

...and this view of the Champion Mine, high on the hill above Rolands Canyon.

A long time ago, on one of my first mineral collecting and mine visiting trips in Nevada, I went to a dumortierite prospect or old mine high on the western range front of the Humboldt Range up some long and narrow — and I thought rough — 4WD road. A long-time grad student with plenty of Nevada and 4WD experience was driving; he exhorted me to always drive with my thumbs on the outside of the steering wheel when traversing backcountry dirt roads.

Most 4WD trucks (all?) lacked power steering back then, and if you hit a rut or rock, the steering wheel could twist radically, and thumbs could get sprained, or worse. (Ford introduced power steering in trucks in 1959 (or 1954?); it became an option in their 4WD trucks in 1979 (or standard by 1977?).)

I still drive with my thumbs outside the wheel on dirt roads.

View of the main Champion Mine workings from a very old road.

The road to the Champion Mine has few pullouts in its steepest and curviest spots, and someone coming downhill when we were going up had to (begrudgingly, it looked like), back up and pull over into a large bush-tree to let us continue going uphill. (A Rule of the West: Drivers going uphill have the right of way on dirt roads, although it seems like very few people know that these days.)

When MOH and I walked up the part of the road that is now completely impassable, I thought the old road, now washed out and heavily overgrown, looked like it hadn't been used for at least 50 years. (But it's been quite a while since I actively knew the ages of old roads and had a lot of practice with road-age estimation.) And when I couldn't identify a road going right to the main dumps, I was became convinced that this wasn't the same dumortierite mine I went to back in '76. (Air photos do indicate a road going to the upper dump, coming in from the direction I remember, so it *is* possibly the same mine.)

Current end of the road, as seen from some lower workings.

And so, we had reached the end of the road and turned around and parked leaving room for someone else to turn around if they came up while we were hiking and prospecting. And we had hiked up the old, overgrown road and climbed the hill to look at the lower workings.

To be continued...

Friday Photo: Dumortierite

Dumortierite with unknown greenish mineral.
Champion Mine, Rochester District, Nevada.

Sites Worth Exploring

I've added a few sites and blogs to my sidebar, mostly in the "Other" category but also in the "Roads and Highways" category:

NoeHill
NoeHill in The West
NoeHill in Nevada

CALIFORNIA BLOG

Geology on US Interstate 80 

westernviews.us

Mountains, Deserts and Glaciers

SouthwestDesertLover

Check them out!

Back to Midas

At long last, we're back on the Tuscarora Loop, with the turnoff to the small town of Midas just up ahead. On our loop trip, taken way back in early June, MOH and I passed Midas by, in favor of making it all the way to Tuscarora. At the time, I had been to neither place, but Tuscarora seemed more out-of-the-way, and therefore more exotic, so down the road we went.

We came back in mid-July, and instead of following the main road, old S.R. 18, to the right, we took the side road up the canyon to the left.

Signs at the turnoff to the Midas road.

Sign at the entrance to the town of Midas, and green trees.

Acme Beer sign, reportedly dating to about 1936.

I was on the lookout for a bar that had been open in 1979 or 1980, a bar I knew as Kirby's Midas Bar, a name given to me by a friend of mine, a young woman who was working as a geologist while staying in Midas in a company trailer. Seeing the old sign for Andy's Midas Bar made me somewhat hopeful about finding either Kirby's or Andy's bar, although Acme Beer dates back primarily to the early 1950s and before. Acme Beer did have a short revival in 1975 to 1979; could it have possibly been being sold in Midas while my friend was in town?

While in Midas, my friend could make or receive phone calls on one of the two phones in town, which had the phone numbers of Midas #1 and Midas #2. Phone numbers like these were fairly common in the 1970s and early to mid- or late 1980s in the small, outlying towns of Nevada. These numbers confused operators outside the state to no end. To place a call into Midas or Getchell, for example, you would dial 0 for an operator and then ask for Midas #1 or Getchell #2 as needed. If dialing in from out of state when trying to reach one of these types of numbers, one learned quickly to ask the out-of-state operator for a Nevada operator, because many outside operators didn't believe that phone numbers like that could even exist.

While I was looking for, and not finding, the bar I'd heard of long ago, MOH and I were hoping that the one known-to-be-operating establishment in Midas, the Midas Saloon and Dinner House, would be open, but it wasn't. This became a concern during a later, uphill, in-the-rain adventure of ours.

Mine dump, ore cart, and portal (?) a little ways up Midas Creek.

Old cabin, garage, or storage shed.

Road to somewhere.

After a quick pass through town, we headed up the hill to the west on this relatively innocent-looking side road. The partly cloudy weather became more and more threatening as storms to the south moved in, creating an unexpectedly muddy situation.