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  • The title was changed to Researching Mines

I found this thread on this forum from a while back that has good information that others use.

 

 

 

  • Like 1

I have found that I find the name of the mine and google it.  If the mine has no name, then I look for surrounding mine and google them to see the likely minerals.  At the very least, the state of Arizona has a document available online for the mining districts and you can see what was found in the district.  I’m sure each state has one.

To find the mine name, typically mylandmatters.org works really well.  I just use the map overlay.  

I will also use the USGS maps from their online map store.

IME, what I’ve found is that if the mine is time, like a prospect with very little surface digging or a small tunnel that is just a few feet, there will likely be little info available for the mine.  IMO, there have been a lot of small mining companies that raise money from their investors and do what looks to me like random sampling until the investors money is gone.  The sampling can be prospects digging many small hole about 6’ across, shallow drill samples, or small tunnels a few feet into the earth, sometimes following a quartz vein.

These small sites amount to almost nothing for me.

I was looking at one yesterday I was going to hike out to, but from 80 years ago to 30 years ago, there was a bit of money going into the exploration of this site, but never resulted in mining on it.  The web said gemstones, gold, and silver was what was pulled from there, but the area is not known for gems and there was trace amounts of gold and silver in the ore, as there is anywhere.

So, that mine seemed to have other people people funding someone’s foolish dream.

  • Like 2

Thank you for the info guys. There's allot of high grade gold mines near by and this one I just found was a fairly large operation. Even Shoes a mine there on the topo map but I have been unsuccessful to find any info on it. I have a book with all the mines in my area but it dosnt list this one. Maybe started after this book....idk.

  • Like 1

You can look at the online maps from BLM here showing closed and open claims online.

https://gbp-blm-egis.hub.arcgis.com/search?collection=dataset&groupIds=44f821e79d254103a62b4fe33c0f0814&layout=grid

And they also have a link where you can download their open and closed claim KML files and put them on Google Earth (I will find it and post it here). Keep in mind it’s not a complete or very well updated file but it’s pretty good if you’re just trying to see what might be in an area you are going to go visit. The closed and historic claim info is interesting to read as it also shows mine type and minerals recovered.

My Land Matters would be the best place to check also.

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USGS's MRDS database is the place to start: https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/

This is a record of most of the historic mines and prospects the USGS has catalogued. It will have links to papers that reference each prospect for further reading. This page gives you options to add a WMS link in Google Earth, or download a .kmz for areas of your chosing (do the .kmz, it doesn't rely on their servers after you get the file). I made an entire video on how to do this years ago on Youtube that was called "Google Earth for Prospecting in 5 minutes" or something similar, look it up if you feel like it, I show how to get this specific layer and how to add .wms links for other data too IIRC?

Unfortunately their servers are constantly running slow, if at all these days. And often crash over the weekends (like, right now it's running unusuably slow, the links barely load).

I am working on creating my own map tiles and tile server to rehost some of these government layers that are just consistently working poorly or completely crashed, when I do I'll put it on Cloudflare or Amazon S3 or something that won't crash or bog down constantly like theirs does. It's been years and they just won't fix it. But if you can get to the .kmz download link, that file will work in Google Earth wether the USGS servers are down or not in the future, so snag that one and you'll always have it. That's the way to do it on your own computer - I'll update my Imagery Atlas site with it when I finish, right now I'm still learning how to convert GIS data/shapefiles to vector tiles, and then how to run my own tile server.

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