Date of Adventure 19 to 24 November 2024
It doesn’t matter if you guys are particularly interested in abandoned mines but I found this one pretty interesting. I’ve been to lots of abandoned mines but most of them were underground mines or just surface fossicking as they say here in Australia. There’s an abandoned gold mine, not far off the Mojave Road, that I visited where the open pit is still there. This one was uranium with a nearby processing plant.
As you drive up, it’s pretty clearly a mine with shitloads of tailings.
There are roads and access all the way from the approach to the mine pit.
Now you’ll just have to put up with my learning how to use a drone to look at interesting places and my poor video editing skills. Hopefully as time goes on I’ll get better at both of these but the videos are a little jerky. But you can see the approach road to the main pit. They must have had some pretty big equipment to cut into the rock like that.
As you can see, the pit is now relatively full of water. I suppose this is just from the rainfall in the area.
Even though this seems like a relatively arid part of Australia there is a significant rainfall during the summer months. See what the general area looks like? I found it to be a really nice area.
At the bottom of the hill where the mine pit is located are a bunch of really significant remaining concrete structures.
Here’s what the overview looks like
If you look at these you can see that the road that comes down from the mine runs right behind these with a flat area at the side of the road. I assume that this was the place where the ore processing was done. They’ve removed so much that it’s hard to tell much about it. At the beginning of the processing area where the ore was brought in the radioactive level would have been relatively low. About like some of the countryside in New Mexico. But at the end of the process they would have material that had a significant level of radioactivity. High enough that I’d have had to account for it when I worked at Los Alamos. But since this place closed down in 1988 they probably didn’t have any excessive protections in place.
But someone who came up here had a happy view of the world!
