A beautiful day greeted us at our campsite in southeast Oregon.A rest stop bathroom had a warning about rattlesnakes biting your butt.We happened upon an opal mine / dimension stone quarry somewhere in the middle of nowhere.Note the metal pillar behind the beautiful scale object (aka Dyan) …A wire saw was looped between pulleys on either side of the quarry.Blocks of banded pink/white sandstone were shaved off the working face with the long wire saw.The sawed blocks would readily separate along bedding planes and were stockpiled at the far end of the quarry.A nearby mill featuring a steam-powered gang saw was then used to cut the blocks into facing. Unfortunately, the steam engine has long-since disappeared, but everything else looked like the operators just walked away while rock was still being cut.The orifice on this piston wheel undoubtedly connected to a steam engine.The steam engine would power the piston wheel which was connected to a series of parallel gangsaw blades, causing them to move back and forth. There were three sets of gangsaw cages. The operators would probably load one cage, and move the piston arm accordingly. Note the water tank that was used to cool and lubricate the blades.The center cage still had two blocks of rock that were slid inside via a railed sled. A wooden box on top was loaded with rocks to force the gang saw blades (between the wooden weight box and the rocks) downward.Here’s a closeup of the gangsaw blades. Each gangsaw would cut a block into twelve slices.… and here are two photos of the gangsaw blades after they’re reached the bottom of the rock. Note that the millwrights did not remove some of the facing stone suggesting an abrupt end to the operation.Most of the mill parts were hand-forged such as the pins holding the saw blades at the top of this photo.These pulleys were used to lift the blades and the pressure boxes after the slabs were cut.The remainder of the drive to Winnemucca was typical basin and range stuff.Check out the faulting within the white unit (quartzite, marble?).
We camped at a mining man-camp / RV park in Winnemucca. I kid you not. The RV pads were surrounded by prefab buildings that hosted single-room triplexes for employees at the nearby mines. Drillers, blasters, muckers, engineers, and even geologists, When I was checking-in, the lady at the desk said that the worker next to our campsite was a very nice man but he had some sort of autism. Upon further questioning, I discovered that he was a geologist.
RV pads on the left, man-camp units on the right. Many of the units had night-shift signs on them letting others know to keep quiet during the day.I tried to strike up a conversation with one of the man-camp tenants but he didn’t speak a word of English so we had a fractured conversation in Spanish about the Amazon part that he was waiting for to fix his truck.
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