Inyo County California Gold Production |
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WILD ROSE DISTRICT
The Wild Rose district is at about lat 36°25' N. and long 117°07' W., in the Panamint Range.
Deposits were discovered in this area about 1906, and the peak production period was 1908-17, when about $11/2 million, chiefly in gold, was produced from the Skidoo mine (Nolan, 1936b, p. 39). Since then various lessees have worked the property for short periods, but production is not known (Norman and Stewart, 1951, p. 51). Minimum total gold production for this district through 1959 was about 73,000 ounces.
Descriptions of the geology of this area are sketchy. Nolan (1936b, p. 39) reported that the deposits are gold-quartz veins in granitic gneiss. Norman and Stewart (1951, p. 51) stated that there are two systems of veins in a body of quartz monzonite and that both have been explored by more than a mile of underground workings.
WILLSHIRE-BISHOP CREEK DISTRICT
The Willshire-Bishop Creek district, 7 to 17 miles west of Bishop, is on the east slope of the Sierra Nevada and in the Tungsten Hills.
This is predominantly a tungsten district, but some gold has been produced as a byproduct. Activity began about 1916 and continued through 1959. The Pine Creek mine, the largest domestic tungsten producer, was the principal source of gold mined in the district, and through the 1950's was the chief source of gold in Inyo County. The Cardinal Gold Mining Co. deposit was mined for gold alone, but it has been closed since 1938 (Bateman, 1956, p. 80). The gold production of this district through 1959 was between 75,000 and 100,000 ounces.
In the mineralized parts of the district the predominant country rock consists of a complex of granitic to dioritic intrusive bodies and roof pendants and discontinuous septa of metavolcanic and metasedimentary rocks of varied lithologic types. The metamorphic rocks are of Paleozoic and Mesozoic age; the igneous intrusives are of later Mesozoic age (Bateman, 1956, p. 9). At the Pine Creek mine, a folded pendant almost 7 miles long that consists of marble, biotite-quartz, hornfels, and metavolcanic rocks is bounded by granite, quartz monzonite, and hornblende gabbro. The tungsten ore bodies are in masses of tactite in the marble along its contact with quartz monzonite. Scheelite and powellite are disseminated in pyroxene and garnet tactite. Molybdenum ore shoots are in silici-fied zones in tactite bodies containing the ore minerals molybdenite, chalcopyrite, and bornite. Gold is recovered from these sulfides during smelting (Bateman, 1956, p. 22-34).
The deposit at the Cardinal mine is in a shear zone in quartzite in a quartzite and schist septum bordered by quartz monzonite and granodiorite. The ore minerals, which are finely disseminated in the sheared quartzite, consist dominantly of pyrrhotite with lesser amounts of arsenopyrite, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, pyrite, and molybdenite. Most of the gold is in the sulfides, but some of it is free (Bateman, 1956, p. 80, 81).
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