A Sense of "Wonder" and the Dreams of Avarice: The Keane Wonder Mine in Death Valley

This is a lonely place. Lonely and harsh. The names we give such places reflect our fundamental fear of such landscapes: Death Valley, Funeral Mountains, Furnace Creek, Badwater. The fact that we made this place a national park and brought in creature comforts and paved roads and golf courses only barely hides the fact that this is a land in which few people can survive without the veneer of technology. To have a breakdown with inadequate supplies and no working phone service is a situation that can quickly spiral into tragedy.

Air conditioning, paved roads, and full-service restaurants allow individuals to put aside fears for survival and replace them with a sort of higher level of perception, that of beauty and wonder. On those days when the wind is not blowing, this is a strikingly quiet land. Quiet enough sometimes that you can hear your own heart beating. And it is beautiful in its own stark way. Without the veneer of photosynthesizing greenery, the color of the rocks and sky blaze forth.

But what about a hundred years ago? In a time when there were no cars, paved roads, and very few amenities of any kind? What drove people to seek out this vast desert. The concept of a "national park" and of any kind of joy being found in nature was an utterly new idea, and it was understood by very few. But there was of course the great motive that unfortunately drives humans more than just about any other: the dreams of avarice. People knew that this unexplored land might contain untold riches in gold or silver or copper. So they came looking.

Gold was discovered here in the Funeral Mountains in the early 1900s. Jack Keene and Domingo Etcharren found a ledge of gold-bearing ore, and sold the rights to a number of investors, and mining commenced in 1906. The ores were more than 1,000 feet up the slope of the mountain, so the miners constructed a mile-long aerial tramway to bring the ores to the mill at the base of the mountain. The tramway became somewhat of an attraction of its own as miners and visitors would get a hair-raising ride up to the mine instead of walking the steep road. The rich ores declined with depth, and the mine closed in 1913, but in the end it was one of the few profitable mines within the confines of present-day Death Valley National Park. The owners made around a million dollars in 1910 dollars (taking inflation into account, this translates to $20 million or so).

We were able to visit the Keane Wonder Mine this year for the first time in more than a decade. The National Park Service closed the site down for a long time because of safety concerns. It reopened last year after many of the tunnels were gated or blocked. The host ore was a metamorphosed Proterozoic sedimentary rock that was once part of the Pahrump Group. The rocks include some beautiful schist samples, including some with chiastolite crystals. This was kind of a neat teaching moment because we would see the same rocks in an unmetamorphosed state the following day at the south end of the Black Mountains.

There are moments though, when you realize what beauty can be found in wildness. I in fact have a great many of those moments in my life. My moment that afternoon came when we were headed down the hill to leave, but I stopped and turned back for a moment...and saw the Moon rising over the Funeral Mountains.

There was great beauty in the sweeping vistas and in the rocks themselves, but I realize that this is not really a place for humans. In a few months the temperatures here will soar into the 120s and there is no water. It's a small version of hell on Earth. It's a place to visit and enjoy for the moment, but ultimately we humans will end up seeking the green hills and valleys of our homes.

Dangit! There's a Jackass Tailgating Me! A Day in Oatman Arizona

How many puns can a man take (or tell)? Today we were on the road again, and true to my resolution, I went someplace new. We were traveling into Arizona, and I knew that there was a stretch of the original Route 66 that passed through the small gold mining town of Oatman. I didn't read up on the site ahead of time, so the presence of their famous 'wild' burros was a bit of surprise. The town is a tourist destination these days, with daily old west gunfights, the Clark Gable/Carole Lombard honeymoon suite at the Oatman Hotel (and a ghost), and lots of curio shops, but the town has an interesting geologic history as well. The burros are the feral descendants of burros who escaped from or were abandoned by the early miners.

There is a jackass in this picture. Oh, and also a burro on the right.

The rocks here at the southern end of the Black Mountains of Arizona are late Cenozoic volcanic tuffs and lava flows which have been eroded into scenic pinnacles and spires. The source of the very extensive Peach Springs Tuff was a caldera in the immediate vicinity of Oatman. The eruption took place 18-19 million years ago, and covered a region extending from Barstow, California to Peach Springs in Arizona. Tens of cubic miles of volcanic ash were blasted into the atmosphere during the catastrophic eruption. Gold and silver have been mined in the region since 1863, with the main production at Oatman between 1915 and 1942. Gold production in the region amounted to about 2.2 million ounces. The Gold Road Mine above town looked to be active when we passed by.

Oatman had a slightly more sinister reputation, at least to the thousands of Dust Bowl refugees who passed this way in the 1930s. The town is located in some rugged mountainous terrain, and Route 66 originally passed through town. The road is steep and winding, and must have been nerve-wracking to the folks driving ancient cars with brakes and transmissions of dubious quality.

Beyond Oatman lay the Colorado River and the vast Mojave Desert of California. Although it is easily traversed today on modern freeways, in the 1930s a summertime passage could be terrifying and dangerous. My grandparents made the journey in the early 1940s, driving at night to avoid the worst of the heat. The town was bypassed in 1953 when a less rugged stretch of highway connected Kingman with the town of Needles in California on the Colorado River.

But on this day, the mountains were beautiful, the road a pleasant drive, and the burros were just being themselves: complete jackasses...

Depth Matters: A Tour of the Kennedy Mine Property in California's Mother Lode

We took one of our fall semester field studies trips last Saturday, to the California Mother Lode between Jackson and Columbia. It included a tour of a spectacular marble cavern (in a coming post), and the Kennedy Mine, which for a long time was one of the most important gold mines in the state.

The mine was the subject of my last post, a first impression of some of the info I learned during the tour: how people died working underground. The tour at the mine was conducted by volunteers working with the Kennedy Mine Foundation, a non-profit organization, and our guide was a fountain of information. The tour is above ground, as the mine was vertical for hundreds of feet, and flooded to boot. Our tour actually lasted 40 minutes longer than the scheduled 90 minutes, which caused me a bit of stress as I was watching the clock ticking towards the appointment time for our other scheduled tour! It was a great opportunity to see one of the most important mines of the Mother Lode.

The grounds are heavily overgrown with gray pine and oak trees, and the site is actually preserved as open space for wildlife (the wishes of the last owner of the land). This was quite a contrast to the old days; a look at old photographs indicated that the site was actually pretty barren of vegetation during the mining years.

The headframe will last a long time. It is 135 feet tall, and composed of iron beams. The original 100 foot tall wooden headframe burned (along with most of the surface developments) in 1928. Debris from the burning headframe fell down the main shaft, blocking any chance of exit for the miners still working thousands of feet below. A previous tragedy saved the men's lives: in 1922 the adjacent Argonaut Mine had burned and 47 miners died. In the aftermath, a connecting tunnel was left in place at the 4,600 foot depth between the two mines. This tunnel allowed the miners to escape unharmed.

The building in the picture at the top of this was the changing room, where miners coming off their shift could shower and change cloths before going home. It serves today as a museum and gift shop. The showers weren't really a job benefit...it allowed the mine operators to make sure no one was walking home with gold samples in their pockets! The practice, called high grading, was a constant problem for the mining companies (maybe if they paid their workers better?).

The cement monoliths above are the foundations of the main hoists for the mines. Keeping air in the mine breathable required an extensive ventilation system; carbon dioxide is a heavier gas and could often sink to the lower reaches of the mines and cause suffocation. If you remember the phrase "canary in a coal mine", it reflected a truth. Miners would carry canaries, which were more sensitive to bad air than humans. If they stopped singing, miners knew they were in danger.

Ore was hoisted to the surface of the mine, and processed in a stamp mill on the slope below the headframe. The Kennedy Mine had one of the largest stamp mills in the entire Mother Lode, with 100 stamps. Each stamp weighed nearly half a ton, and they were in constant motion, vertical hammers rising and falling, crushing the ore into a sand-like consistency. Mercury and other "benign" chemicals were used to separate the gold from the waste material. Mercury combines with gold to form a solid alloy called amalgam.

The mine waste was a problem. It was full of sulfide minerals that converted to acids on exposure to the atmosphere, and water in the town below was being fouled. In the early 1900s, a system of buckets and giant wheels was constructed to carry tailings over a nearby ridge to a reservoir that could isolate the poisons from the domestic water supply (you can see pictures of the wheels here).

 The monstrous piece of metal in the picture below was a camshaft that was used to lift the stamps.

The mine office is the best preserved building on the mine property. It was built in 1908, and was one of the only buildings to survive the 1928 fire. It included some contradictory operations, although they make a certain amount of sense when one thinks about it. There were two big blast furnaces, one for separating the gold from the mercury, and the second for melting the gold and producing ingots for delivery to the mint in San Francisco. I have to imagine that the whole building must have been terribly hot in summertime (temps in the Mother Lode often exceed 100 degrees). The other side of the ground floor was the assay office, which tested ores at the end of every day, so the quality of ore was always known.

The second floor contained mine offices, the safe, and the pay room. Miners made around $4 a day in the 1920s, and specialists (foremen, carpenter, assayers, and blacksmiths made almost twice as much). These were fairly reasonable wages for the time.

The third floor contained four bedrooms of all things. They were there to house investors when they paid a visit to the mine. They mostly lived in San Francisco and the journey could be long and dusty.

The view from the mine office building is quite nice, overlooking the town of Jackson, and the eroded volcanic neck of Jackson Butte, seen in the picture above.

The Kennedy Mine operated unsuccessfully from 1860 to the late 1870s. New technology (especially the invention of dynamite and steam operated drills) led to a successful expansion of the mine in the 1880s, and the Kennedy operated profitably until 1942 when it is shut down by presidential decree during World War II. When it closed down it was the deepest mine in the United States at 5,912 feet. It ultimately produced about 1.5 million ounces of gold, worth about $2.4 billion at today's prices. It was one of the biggest gold producers in the Mother Lode.

He thought his had exploded. It hadn't, yet.

Gallows humor is a tricky thing. Something about this event having happened in 1925 provides some emotional distance perhaps, but someone did die, and in a nasty mining accident. Working in mines is one of the most dangerous of human endeavours, and I can barely imagine what conditions were like in the mines of the Mother Lode in the 1920s before government regulations sought to make the mines safer. And given recent deaths in Utah coal mines, it seems that regulations have hardly made things safer when owners are greedy and unscrupulous.

And yet, there is something kind of tragicomic in the descriptions I read today about how people died in accidents in the Kennedy Mine in Jackson, California. Not the way, or fact that they died, but in the matter-of-fact way in which the deaths were reported in the museum display:

"Asked for a light (candle), came to get it, stepped into a shaft" (1887)

"Doing "nature's business". Found drowned in sump with pants around knees" (1888)

"On previous shift, 10 of 11 shots heard; missed shot not reported. He drilled in that hole" (1897)

"He heard two [blasts], thought his had exploded. It hadn't, yet" (1925)

"Set 47 holes at once. Lighting last fuse when first went off...Wasted time during lighting because fuses were wet." (1941)

The Kennedy Mine was one of the most important of the California Mother Lode mines, producing something like 1.5 million ounces of gold from 1860 to 1942, and when it closed, it was the deepest hardrock mine in the world, at 5,912 feet (mines in South Africa now reach more than 12,000 feet in depth). As it turns out, only 36 people died in accidents in the mine, although statistics do not record how many died due to diseases like silicosis from inhaling mine dust. It was a hard life, working underground.

I learned these facts on a tour of the Kennedy Mine today, accompanied by a bunch of my students. It was my first time on the site, although I have observed the mine from a distance for many years. It was an interesting exploration, although it didn't include any underground aspects (this would be difficult considering the main mine opening is a vertical shaft hundreds of feet deep. Many of the buildings are still present, including a very impressive headframe 135 feet high.

More on our interesting trip a bit later. In the meantime, does this furnace at the mine remind you of anyone?

A Day in the Field...Doing Geology in the Mother Lode

The state flower growing in the state rock next to a site where the state mineral was being mined...the only thing missing was the state mammal, and it's been missing for 80 years. On second thought, I would prefer not to have run into our state mammal anyway. It's the California grizzly, after all. I am talking about an early spring arrival California poppy growing in an exposure of serpentine along a fault in California's Mother Lode where gold was being mined from the 1850's through the 1930's. I was in the field last Saturday!

It's been an emotionally tough week. The sorrow and grief over the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, compounded by the ongoing meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant has been bearing down on most of us. We face draconian budget cuts in our state educational system, and friends and fellow workers received layoff notices this week. Science is under attack at a time when it needs to be upheld as a way of working through serious and profound problems that face society in agriculture, energy and climate change. But the right questions aren't even being asked or discussed.

I have felt despair in so many ways. But like I said, I was in the field last Saturday, and I learned something. Teachers may think of their role as trying to inspire their students, but sometimes it's the other way around. The thirty students inspired me as they discovered some new things about their world. I wasn't dragging them around; they were pulling me...

We were exploring the southern Mother Lode between the Gold Rush towns of Mariposa and Jamestown, and learned how the gold was mined, how it formed, and a bit about the environmental devastation the mining caused. We got to collect the gold ore, quartz crystals, a rare chromium mica called mariposite, and pyrite. We also had a nice view up the Merced River towards Yosemite Valley! El Capitan is the steep cliff on the left, the tip of Half Dome appears just left of center, and Clouds Rest is the snowy peak behind El Cap.

We started at the dredge tailings around Snelling and Merced Falls. To get at microscopic bits of gold that had been carried down the rivers into the Central Valley, the mining companies dug holes down to the groundwater table, forming ponds in which they floated a factory ship that dug out one end of the pond, processed the sediments for gold, and dumped the waste on the other end. They worked their way across the landscape, ripping up the topsoil and leaving behind square miles of rockpiles. The land is mostly useless now, but it provided us an opportunity to identify the kinds of rocks that occur upstream, and which reveal something of Sierran history. There was quartzite (baked and pressurized beach sands), metavolcanic greenstone, slate, and occasional fragments of marble and granite. Three quarters of the rocks found in the Sierra are various types of granitic rock, but in the Mother Lode, the more ancient and more common metamorphic rocks tell a story of ancient shorelines, terrane collisions, volcanism and other activity. These rocks are far older than the granitic intrusions.
Later in the day we explored an abandoned gold mine (just the outside, mind you) where we found the most interesting minerals, and found the famous outcrop just west of Coulterville where we could see the minerals and rocks in their original arrangement. This stretch of the Mother Lode was relatively barren of gold, so the outcrop was not mined like so many others.

It was nice to see them discussing and exploring the outcrop! That doesn't always happen.

Our day included a stop at the California State Mining and Mineral Museum in Mariposa, where a great many spectacular specimens are on display. I photograph a different group of minerals every time I visit, and somehow I concentrated on the gold this time. The leafy gold above is a piece of a larger 44 lb nugget discovered at the Harvard Open Pit Mine just before it closed down in the 1990's (the big nugget is on display at the Ironstone Winery in Murphys, a bit farther north just off of Highway 49. Below is the Fricot Nugget, weighing in at 13 lbs. It's the biggest specimen on display, and one of the largest to survive the Gold Rush era without being melted down. If you are curious, the largest single specimen ever found in the state weighed just short of 200 lbs. It got melted down, but a replica is on display in the museum.

Strangely enough, the specimen I found most interesting was one of the smallest. We tend think of gold as nuggets that have been rolled in a stream and rounded off. We don't often think of gold crystals, but there it is below. Gold crystallizes in the isometric (cubic) system, but not generally as square cubes. The specimen below looks to be more like a dodecahedron.

Across from the mine site we took a brief excursion into the Earth's mantle, which is normally found many miles below the crust, but which been pushed up to the surface along a major fault system. Most of the mantle rock (peridotite)has been altered to serpentine, but we could find some chunks of mostly unaltered mantle material.

We ended the day with stops to look at the abandoned Harvard Open Pit Mine that operated in the 1980's and 1990's, and at Table Mountain near Jamestown, a famous example of an inverted stream. I may have more to say about it next week, since our geology club is intending to climb it this weekend (in the rain, probably).

All in all it was a good day, a brief respite from sorrow, and a day of being inspired by the enthusiasm of some great students.

The Other California: I've Seen These Mountains Somewhere Before: The Big Ripoff!

This is an ongoing exploration of the "Other California"; the wonderful geological places in our state that are rarely found on a postcard. After some geological distractions (like giant earthquakes in Chile and tsunamis in Hawaii), we are back on the road looking at some peaks that look strangely familiar. They're made of granitic rock, they've been subjected to exfoliation and jointing, forming the sheer cliffs and rounded peaks. The mountains here have been glaciated. Where would you think we were, if you are a dyed-in-the-wool Californian?

If you guessed the Sierra Nevada, you would be wrong. And right, too, in a sense.

We started a tour of the Klamath Mountains talking about their origin as bits and pieces of oceanic crust and continental fragments that were assembled into a complicated exotic terrane that was attached to the North American continent in Mesozoic time. We followed up by discussing the alleged presence of Sasquatch in the region (though the discussion didn't last long; the Chilean earthquake proved far more interesting as a scientific issue that week).

Today we note the striking similarities between the Klamath Mountains and the northern part of the Sierra Nevada (see the map above). Both mountain systems have rocks that are primarily metamorphic sequences that have been intruded by Mesozoic granitic rocks. The metamorphic rocks are of similar age and structure. They have been faulted in much the same way. They are, in few words, the same mountain range, at least in the origin of the rocks. Direct correlations of the complicated metamorphic sequences have been established in recent publications by the US Geological Survey.

The oddest part of the story seems to be the overall shape of the two provinces. They look as if they were bent and torn apart from each other and separated by a distance of around 60 miles. And they were, around 140-150 million years ago, in late Jurassic or early Cretaceous time. A shallow sea opened between the two landmasses, and several thousand feet of sediments were laid down on the rocks (the Hornbrook Formation). It was a huge rip-off!

By Pliocene time (4 or 5 million years ago), the region was a flat low plain, but it rose rapidly, as much as 6,000 feet, in the last few million years. Rivers coursing across the flat surface quickly incised the deep canyons that characterize the region today (small gravel remnants of the rivers can be found on some of the higher parts of the topography).

The implications of the similarity of the two provinces was not lost on the Forty-niners. Gold was mined from the metamorphic rocks of the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode, and the rocks in the Klamaths were clearly of the same origin. Gold was discovered in the Klamaths in 1848, and numerous towns sprang up soon after. The region was the second most important gold mining region in the state of California after the Mother Lode, with several million ounces of gold produced.

For some recent research on the uplift history of the Klamath Mountains, check out: Cretaceous Sedimentary Blanketing and Tectonic Rejuvenation in the Western Klamath Mountains: Insights from Thermochronology

So, What's Wrong With a Bit of Arsenic, Mercury and Sulfuric Acid in Your Drinking Water?

Top photo by Garry Hayes, bottom photo from the Kennedy Mine Foundation

The mining history of California's Mother Lode is fascinating, and in many ways downright scary. It is astounding to realize the length mine owners went to wrest those little flakes of metal from the ground, without regard to the Native Americans who inhabited the region for thousands of years, without regard to the communities of people both near by, and far downstream, and with a shocking disregard for their own workers, the men who risked their lives daily deep in the earth. And of course, the environment was an unknown concept. The gold was there; it therefore had to be pulled out. It was all about money, of course.

On our field trip this last weekend, we had a chance to explore some of the mine complexes in and around Jackson, on Highway 49 in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode. Yesterday's post was about our tour underground at the Sutter Creek Mine. Another of our stops was at a fascinating city park, the Kennedy Mine Tailings Wheels.

The Kennedy Mine was one of giants of the hard rock mines of the Sierra Mother Lode. From 1860 to 1942, the mine produced around 1.7 million ounces of gold, worth about $17 billion at today's prices. At the time of the mine's closure (because of World War II), the workings had reached a depth of 5,912 feet, making it one of the deepest mines in the world (there are mines in South Africa that are more than 12,000 feet today). According to different sources, the length of the underground workings totaled at least 50 miles (and maybe over 100).

The earliest miners would have worked with candles (i.e. open flames), hand operated drills, and black powder for explosives (i.e. not so good in presence of open flames). Innovations in the late 1860's and 1870's included carbide lamps, steam powered drills, and dynamite (courtesy of Nobel, of the Nobel Prize). Still, not the best of work environments. No one wore hardhats. Miners operating the drills (called "widow-makers") got paid a lot more than everyone else, but developed silicosis within a few years, and died. Cave-ins and rockbursts were not uncommon events. One of the saddest episodes was in 1922 when a fire trapped 47 miners at the 4,600 foot level of the adjacent Argonaut Mine. Miners at the Kennedy worked feverishly to drill a tunnel to the Argonaut passage, but they were too late and the miners were lost.

The gold ore was brought to the surface and crushed using huge stamp mills. The tailings were treated with arsenic and mercury to remove the gold, and then stacked in huge piles around the mine property. Upon exposure to the atmosphere, many of the sulfide minerals were transformed into strong acids. Being upstream from the town of Jackson, the poisons were seeping into the domestic water supply. By 1914, the mine was "encouraged" by lawsuits and court actions to build a tailings reservoir a half mile away, and over two ridges from the mine property. The wheels were a unique invention used to transport the tailings slurry from the mine to the reservoir. The wheels had dozens of buckets that picked up the mush from the base of the wheel, and dropped them forty feet higher onto a flume that carried the debris to the next wheel. Four wheels were needed in total.

Jackson is a quiet tourist town today, and the wheels provide a photogenic stop on a tour of the Mother Lode. It certainly wasn't always picturesque, or quiet. The 100-stamp mill, and the wheels would have run 24 hours a day. The older photo (from the Kennedy Mine Foundation) shows the barren slopes and the spartan buildings that housed the wheels. The buildings were removed during World War II, and two of the wheels collapsed, in 1963 and 1971 (history of the wheels here).

The last owner of the Kennedy Mine had purchased the abandoned site in 1961, and her will stipulated that the property be preserved as a wildlife area and that the mine be protected as a historical site. The Kennedy Mine Foundation was established to do this in 1996, and they offer above ground tours of the mine site for a modest fee (especially for school groups).