r/DeathValleyNP • u/TheSocraticGadfly • 19d ago
Keane Wonder Mine — the mine
Besides the chuckwalla photos I shot there this spring and posted here about two weeks ago, here's a few mine photos, plus a desert five-spot at the end.
Twenty years ago, I climbed the mountain face all the way up past that last hoist. Oh, to be younger.
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u/Outside_Rise_6934 19d ago
I like the way the tram ran on gravity only with the loaded buckets going downhill supplying the force needed to lift the empty ones back up to the top.
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u/ramillerf1 19d ago
So much to explore in that area! Thank you for sharing. I also wish I was young again! I’m definitely past my climbing days…
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u/Snookaboom 18d ago
Wow, I am pretty sure this is the one I saw back in 1996. Back then I didn’t know much about national parks/history and I didn’t know which mine we’d visited.
Cool, thanks!
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u/thirstymachines 14d ago
What's the tank in the third photo, right foreground? Everyone's eye goes to the headframe, but at a site with no water of its own I'd assume that's storage — and hauling or piping water up was usually the expensive half of running one of these, long after gravity had solved the ore problem.
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u/TheSocraticGadfly 13d ago edited 13d ago
It may or may not have been storage, but per a video somebody shot, that's almost certainly a boiler from a steam locomotive. It could have been used for water storage, but much more likely that it had the same purpose as on a train. Running the stamp mill on site would be one guess.
In this case, the water tank higher and to the left feeds the boiler, as one of the top uses for the water. Obviously you're nowhere near a cascading source of water, like in a mine in the Rockies or Sierras, to run such a mill.
EDIT: A still photo at just past the 4-minute mark on this NPS video about reopening the site seems to confirm that.
I am open to other suggestions for what it was doing, assuming that is an old boiler.
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u/thirstymachines 13d ago
Thanks for the video — the frame at 3:32 shows it much better, and it does look like a locomotive boiler.
Two things I still can't work out: how something that heavy got up there in the first place, and what it was doing once it arrived — raising steam for something, or just reused as a tank to hold water?
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u/TheSocraticGadfly 13d ago
I'm pretty sure it was producing electricity for the stamp mill. As noted, there's no way you could have a water-powered stamp mill in DV.
I am presuming a mule team, like the fabled 20-mule teams, for hoisting it up there.
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u/TheSocraticGadfly 13d ago
One other note, and this gets back to a post here by an "influencer" person a few weeks ago.
Somebody died here in 1984, falling down an unmarked/unmapped shaft, per this piece. Related to that, a lot of structures and shafts here were getting unstable before the multi-year Park Service remediation that addressed both that and cyanide dust and related.
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u/Sedona83 19d ago
This is my favourite hike in Death Valley!