In a mining town at the turn of the century you would have heard the stamp
mill for miles around it was a deafening sound and today if you stand in Skidoo
all you really hear is silence and you can sit and think in that silence about
how life may have been here over a hundred years ago. You can look at the
stamp mill and imagine what it may have sounded like you can rummage through
some of the old broken bottles or tin cans that were left behind and try and
imagine what those would have held or who would have discarded them and this
place is really interesting to do that with and these are really important
things for us to be able to continue to study and look at and remember.
Death Valley's history is really tied into mining and it's a very different
way of life than I think we experience today so being in Death Valley or being
in a place like Skidoo really gives you kind of a window into a bygone era many
people have come through Death Valley looking for riches and trying to strike
it big most of these people ended up failing some places though did actually
thrive in Death Valley and Skidoo is kind of one of those places it ended up
turning a profit which is not what quite a few of the mining operations in this area did.
In 1906 there were two men that discovered it and very quickly sold it
to a man named Bob Montgomery he over speculated the town and really thought
that this place would last and become a very large mining community for the area.
There were tent cities that sprung up in the area and hundreds of
people miners and workers came to be here and to be at Skidoo and work this
mine and it really didn't last very long the post office was put in place here in
1907 and then by 1908 pretty much everything had folded in this town.
There isn't much left of the town site at Skidoo but the stamp mill is pretty
spectacular it's one of my favorite places in the park that has mine resources.
The stamp mill is where they crushed the ore and we're able to do
some of the extractions so that they could actually extract that gold.
Skidoo was either the biggest or the second biggest goldmine in Death Valley
Keane wonder being the other production-wise probably the biggest and
the Skidoo mill is one of the best-preserved in all the Mojave desert
and was one of the few that was actually powered with water.
You'll notice the mill is built on the side of a steep hill
this is actually fairly common for
milling operation and the reason is a lot of times the milling process
involves multiple steps and when you build on the side of a hill you can line
up all your equipment in sequence and then use gravity to move the ore from
one section to the next.
So here we are at the top where ore is first introduced
to the mill and we have a platform and the large ore bin. Now originally ore was
transported to the mill via wagon. However in the 1930s when Skidoo was
mined for the second time dump trucks were used and this structure actually
was built in the 30s it's sturdier it was made to accommodate the larger loads.
Here we are we're now at the bottom of the ore bin and we're at the start of
the milling process. This piece of equipment right here is known as a jaw
crusher and the first step in milling is to break the ore down.
The ore comes out of the bin goes in the crusher gets reduced in size and it was
fed along a conveyor belt it's no longer present down into a second
ore bin above the stamp mill.
After going through the jaw crusher the ore goes on the conveyor
belt down to the second ore bin and then is fed down here to the stamps.
There are 15 stamps and these would alternate they would go up and down be dropped onto the
ore and they pulverize it into sand and all this was powered with water from the
Skidoo pipeline. So these going up and down you have metal banging on rock
making a tremendous noise and this is all enclosed inside a metal building.
Stamp mill workers were some of the best paid workers on the site but part
of the trade-off was that most of them went deaf within a few years in fact it
was so loud inside these mills that they would have to communicate with hand signals.
The action from the stamps was so violent that in many mills including
this one the stamps were put on their own foundation so that they didn't shake
apart the whole building. So after the ore is pulverized from the
stamps it comes over and comes down over these amalgamation tables.
These tables would have looked a bit different when they were in production because they
would have been covered with copper plates and the copper plates would have
been brushed with mercury. The purpose of crushing the ore is to separate the gold
from the rest of the material. After going through the stamps the gold that
had been separated which is known as free gold would come down onto these
plates and would bond with the mercury and would form amalgam which is
essentially a paste and once enough gold had gone over and you had enough amalgam
it was saturated basically someone would come along scrape it off and then brush
more mercury onto the plates for the gold that was still attached to other
material it would continue on down to the next level
cyanide processing.
Now these cyanide tanks would all been filled with sodium cyanide solution and
the ore would have been put in them for a number of days long enough for the
gold to be separated from the rest of the material the gold would bond to the
solution and then eventually for recovery the what's known as the
pregnant solution would be removed and run through a box of zinc shavings and
then after all that work the miners finally had their gold.
The Skidoo mill is very fragile and it's important to remember that you should
never climb on this or any other historic structure not only is it
dangerous but it's also against park regulations and of course any time
you're in a national park leave everything as you found it don't don't
take anything from the site natural or mining related.
One thing I'd like to stress is that when people visit these sites they
shouldn't be going into the mines you know we have a motto 'stay out stay alive'
and it's for good reason.
I really enjoy going to mine sites especially in Death Valley it really
gives me a connection to the past it gives me a connection to this place and
whether a thousand people have seen it before or I was the first person to have
seen it in a hundred years it still feels like I'm discovering something by
coming to these places and by looking at these things and by touching something
that someone might not have touched for well over a hundred years it's really
kind of a powerful thing to feel like you're discovering something and
especially in Death Valley I feel like there's a lot to discover.
you