While heading out on a trip to Nevada, we rendezvoused for a quick exploration of the old Oro Fino Mine in the Old Dad Mountains of the Mojave Preserve. The mines are closed by iron bat-gates. The cabins, however, have been recently repaired by volunteers and are in good shape.
This fairly remote and old silver, lead and zinc (with some traces of gold and copper) mine is a pretty neat site. The old camp dates from the 1870s and was re-worked in the 1920s. The mine has four levels (not including the adit level) and a few thousand feet of workings. I recently revisited the site and it still looks to be in good shape.
We have been visiting this mine many times over the years. It is one of the earlier mines in the War Eagle mine group. It was successful enough that the owners built a tramway down the hillside and developed their own railroad to connect to the mainline Tidewater and Tonopah railroad. Now that’s a good mine!
These are various photos from our trips over the years to the Columbia #2 mine out in the Mojave desert. Part of the War Eagle complex of mines, it is well-travelled. The main incline has caved and no longer useable.
We’ve visited this mine many times since first exploring it in 2001. It is well-known and well-travelled, but still fun to explore. The mine has miles of drifts and stopes across at least nine levels. It has a few hard to reach passageways and there are connections I still haven’t seen. You can easily spend all day underground.
Down in the southern end of Death Valley, a small group of mines lies hidden in a low set of hills. First prospected for copper and silver in the 1880s, the deposits turned out to be small and the remoteness of the area made them uneconomical. Like many other mines of the era, they never amounted to very much. In later years, the mines were revived and worked briefly for talc. Those too proved to be small and unprofitable. Not much is left from those early mining days, except a few bits of rusted machinery, tin cans and a small, rustic cabin.