#71: More From the Pine Creek Mine Site

Here is our second of three posts from Wednesday’s trip above Pine Creek with Lynn Goodfellow. For background about the trip, see the last post we made on Thursday (scroll down).

From the basin above Lower Morgan Lake we headed toward the backside of Wheeler Ridge and up a steep, rocky pitch.

We cruised around through several of the plugged mines. There were so many that it was the first time he had really seen some of them. We continued on to the top of the hill onto the Panaminas mine site and stopped at a small snow-and-creek-fed tarn. There were bighorn sheep tracks all around the water and Goodfellow said it was from this point that the local wildlife biologists start to track the sheep in the summer. We searched around the surrounding hillside for them, but saw none. I bet if we had been there early in the morning or late in the evening, we would have  seen them. Continue on with the pictures and captions and check in early next week for some great shots from the way down. We got back down around 7pm and the light at the end was amazing.

-Dave

Look at the colors in this hillside. The minerals create so many different layers.

Here is another shot of the lakes around Morgan Pass.  The green hue in the rock is copper. The tungsten was the main reason Union Carbide came to mine here, but there are several other types of minerals in the rock.  Here is Goodfellow up in one of the closed mines, with his Razor at the bottom.  We though this looked like The Minarets. See the resemblance? This is looking south-southwest from the top. Mt. Tom is off to the left, in the background.  Have you ever seen a swimming mouse? He was tiny, maybe an inch-and-a-half long.  We filled up our water bottles from this pipe. The water was cold and crisp.  This is the tarn that the sheep come to for water. We could see signs of them everywhere, but we didn’t see any.