How to get mine info?

[Chris142]

I'm wondering. How does someone get info such as how much a mine produced, it's name etc? I'm curious about a few mines and after several years of searching I have found there names and that they were Gold mines.

They are in Johnson Valley, Ca.

The first one is the Johnson mine. It goes in 400ft then it goes to a T. Go right about 400ft. Go back to the T and go the other way about 200ft. You will pass a Stope with a crank setup to lower a bucket? There is a ladder that goes down the stope but I'm not that brave.

I can't see somebody doing this much work w/o making a profit. The tailing pile is rather large. I have metal detected the mine and it's full of small Ore cart spikes, nuts and bolts etc.

The next is the Cumberland "high hope". This is several shafts actully. There is a 1911 date on a rock near the deepest shaft. There is a large Arastra there also. This mine has lots of Ore on the ground and pieces with Gold have been found here.

Next is the Red hills mine. This is a shaft and a short tunnel on 2 different hills.

I'm assuming that L-208 put these out of business.

The Barstow, Ca BLM ofice is no help and I've never been able to figure out their L2000 site.

Can anybody shed any info? Thx, Chris

[Ossyconno]

Welcome to Mojave.

To find out what minerals were located in a named mine, http://www.mindat.org/ is a good place to start your search.

To search a area for mines I get information from this website, http://www.westernmininghistory.com/minesmap/

Also you can do a search through this forum for Masmils and google .kmz files that will give you names and locations.

[lobster68w]

This is a very good article on adding locations to Google Earth.

http://www.mindat.org/article.php/485/Google+Earth+Meets+MRDS%3A+A+Basic+Tutorial

[Chris142]

Thanks guys. I have played with the Mindat site. I have found it to be very inacurate. Off as far as 1000ft. This caused me to chase my tail for a couple of years untill I found an old book online and this book actully describes the mine(s) in better detail.

I closed up the shop early yesterday and got to go play. A friend and I explored the Gold Belt mine South of Barstow, Ca, I brought home lots of Vuggy Quartz to ooggle at.

[ryan162]

Hey Chris its Troy from MJR.

How was the gold belt? I have heard that was a crawl for an entrance and also had pretty stale air.

Good to see you on here! I still dont know spit about the rocks, but always think about going back to get a chunk of that pretty fools gold/quartz/turquoise you found that one day on the MJR trip to the Indian paintings.

[Chris142]

Hey Troy! Where have you been?

Not a whole lot for me to see at the Gold Belt. When you drive up to it the road ends at the foundations for the Mill. I ran my metal detector around for about 10 minutes but the place is packed full with old nails, washers etc. I gave that up after about 10 minutes.

If you walk East from the Mill area about 75 ft there is a tunnel and you must crawl to get in. Once in it opens up to about 6ft tall. This one goes East about 500ft I would guess then it's caved.

Once back out you can see a trail leading over the hill. We walked up that trail. Down the other side and saw a hole in a wash and another tunnel. We crawled into that entrance and that tunnel goes about 500ft east too then it's caved.

Back out and into the wash. Theres another trail that leads up that hill to the actual mine. The mine goes nearly straight down so that was the end of my journey.

What these guys did was to pull the ore out of the mine then dumped it down a short shaft to an ore car. They pushed the ore car to the wash then dumped the ore down a 2nd shaft into a 2nd ore car then rolled that one to the mill.

Pretty strange! I don't know why they didn't just use an above ground tram? Seems a lot cheaper and easier than blasting through 1000 ft of mountain. Or Ore cars on rails with a pulley system to control their speed much like an elevator does.

Of course one goof would have a 2600lb Ore car rolling to the mill @ 100 mph!

So other than a couple of haul tunnels that don't follow any veins I didn't see a whole bunch. Sure the tunnels did cross a few veins of different minerals but nothing really exiting in there.

The hills between the Mill and Mine shaft are loaded with Iron stained Vuggy Quarts. Thats a good place to look for Gold.

If you should go down into the actual mine bring me some samples.

[ryan162]

Ive have been getting out exploring a bit but not as much as I want.

Gold belt sounds interesting... I did not know it had a vertical shaft to it. Did it look like there would be anything to tie ropes off on to rappel in? Or would it be possible to position a vehicle near the shaft? I'm pretty new to vertical, but it sure does open up some neat things. I wouldnt have the foggiest idea what to get you down there lol.

Happy hunting!

[Chris142]

Ain't way to drive anywhere near the mine. Could a guy pound a piece of pipe into the ground and tie off that? I don't do that repelling stuff...

[ryan162]

I'm not skilled enough to know what to do in that situation. I gotta check that one out some day though. It was one of the bigger operations near us I think.