From Hard Knocks to Hard Rocks: A Journey in My Shoes Book Two: From the Hills of the Ozarks to Mines Around the World

By Richard L. Bullock

While Book One covered about 40 years of the first part of my life and took place mostly in my home state of Missouri, Book Two covers the second half of my life and focuses on many more world travels, more adventures, with some life threating stores. I'm anxious to tell you about my narrow escape from being captured by the infamous "Shining Path" in southern Peru, which was a story which sounds like Indiana Jones episode than a mining assignment; then there was the snow "white-out' that kept me stuck in Polaris, Little Cornwallis Island (about 200 miles from the magnetic north pole), where the outside temperature dipped to -70 degrees F for several extra days; and where only two weeks before I had experience the sultry heat on my short visit to a mine in the Amazon. I describe how it felt to be treated like the "ugly American" in Panama during the Noriega reign. I had a near death experience in Cancun, when I had an allergic reaction to some medication, where my throat swelled shut. Then there was the scary health experience that occurred while doing due diligence on a group of mines on the Tibetan plateau on a trip to China. These are just a few of the places and stories that I know you will find interesting. Some of the countries which I describe experiences during those travels were: Australia, Austria, Bolivia, Canada, China, Chile, Honduras, Germany, Mexico, Peru, Switzerland. Then there were also those trips for pleasure to Greece, Turkey, England, Wales, Scotland, Spain, Portugal and Morocco. Of course, there are many stories about my travels in the USA including Hawaii and Alaska. You will also get a small insight into the task of due diligence as it is precariously performed in the mining industry, that I believe will surprise even the most experienced of our industry. So, I hope that you will travel with me on the second half of my life's journey. You will have company, as my Guardian Angel will be traveling with us, or the journey would have been much,

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543975628

Book preview

EPILOGUE

SECTION VI: OUR CONNECTICUT HOME

The Corporate Adjustment

After the first 20 years working for St. Joe Minerals Company in the Old Lead Belt and the New Lead Belt of Missouri, working in various mining research positions and ending up as director of mine research and mine development, and working in operations management in all positions from shift foreman to division superintendent of their most profitable operation, I was transferred to corporate headquarters in New York. My task there still included mining research overview of all the company’s operations, but also mineral property evaluations from all the world-wide explorations and property acquisitions, as well as oversight of mine and mill developments for metal mines and coal mines. My wife, Ruth, and I decided to relocate to Fairfield, Connecticut; I would commute into the city on the New Haven rail line. We contracted a new house to be built, which would take approximately four months to complete.

I was so busy trying to get settled in the new office and running back and forth between Viburnum, MO (where I previously lived), the Massey Coal operations (which I was still the mining liaison), and New York that I didn’t really have much time to observe whether the construction had begun on the house in Connecticut. I first had to get moved into my office in New York, which included hiring a secretary who could keep things straight while I was traveling and to type my reports. I hired Jane Cinciminio, a local New York girl that was pleasant to work with and seemed very efficient. I really appreciated her help and trusted her judgement.

Our office location, at 250 Park Avenue, was great. After my 80-minute commute on the New Haven line into Grand Central, it was only about a block and a half walk to our office, mostly through buildings.

I had about 30 file cases of records and books sent from the Viburnum office. These records were all my technical notes, starting with my college notes from my B.S., M.S., and D.Eng., as well as copies of all the research notes and reports with which I had been involved. They also included all the evaluations and cost estimates I’d performed on various projects. It took a while just to get this all organized and filed. Meanwhile, I was living in a second-rate hotel on Lexington Avenue about three blocks from the office. I stayed there when I was in town (which wasn’t all that often) for several months. Once the house in Connecticut got started, I moved into a motel in Fairfield so I could monitor the last few months of it’s being built.

St. Joe in Missouri sold their used pool cars after they had nearly 90,000 miles on them, and I bought one of them to use as my station car. I had driven it to Connecticut from Missouri, and it did just fine (except that it didn’t have an air conditioner). And now I could take the commuter train out to Fairfield and still have a car to get around in.

As to ongoing projects, I was in constant touch with the St. Joe exploration teams. I needed to stay informed about what was going on in both eastern and central Tennessee, as well as the southwestern exploration near the Tucson office. I was also actively visiting the operating mines in the east Tennessee area, then operated by American Zinc, New Jersey Zinc (NJZ), and U.S. Steel.

A Key Player in the St. Joe Diversification

My move to the New York office was really prompted by St. Joe’s president, Jack Duncan. He was guiding St. Joe as it changed from a basic domestic lead-zinc company to a diversified, multinational company. Long before he came on board, St. Joe had already gotten into the iron business, with its discovery of the high-grade Pea Ridge ore body in south central Missouri. Duncan let it be known that St. Joe wanted to invest in the energy business, which led to its acquisition of the A.T. Massey Coal Company, which I played a significant role in (as I detail in Book 1).

I continued to deal with the Massey Coal mining group as a member of the operations management committee and mine and process plant developments, as well as in their new acquisitions. I knew the Massey operations better than anyone else in St. Joe, and I felt that I was a necessary liaison between its management on the operating level and our corporate staff management. The Massey Company’s president and CEO, Morgan Massey, felt the same way, and often requested my assistance, much to the chagrin of my boss, Peter Nalle. Peter didn’t think I should be helping with coal company projects; he felt that I should only assist St. Joe projects. But A.T. Massey was pouring a major portion of its company profits into St. Joe coffers, and deserved the little assistance that I could give.

St. Joe also bought one relatively small oil company, CanDel Oil Ltd., and formed another oil group, St. Joe Petroleum. Thus, it had oil and natural gas activities in the United States, Canada, the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of Suez. Much of this acquisition was done in the mid-1970s, just before the energy crisis of 1979. St. Joe later bought another small oil company, Coquina Oil, which was mainly into natural gas. In addition, it was interested in almost any other mineral or metal which seemed like it would be profitable. We looked at a little of everything.

By this time, my desk was backed up with several reports I needed to evaluate to determine if St. Joe should be interested in certain properties. The Courtland/Gleason property in Arizona was a low-grade porphyry copper deposit, submitted to me by the St. Joe Tucson Exploration group; there was also a lead mine in Nova Scotia, submitted to us by Phelps Dodge for potential joint venture consideration; the Pine Grove moly property, likewise submitted by Phelps Dodge; and finally, Silvermines, a lead/silver prospect in Nova Scotia submitted by our Canadian exploration group. Each property took weeks to evaluate, depending on how much information was included. Of course, a report had to be written on each of them. Despite that, none of them fit our criteria for further study, and we didn’t consider any trips to them.

It was about this time that Merwin (Bernie) Berstein, our South American exploration manager directed my attention to a property from Honduras, the Minas del Oro property. It was an underground copper property, and he described the geologic rock conditions as being very unstable. I laid out an underground cut-and-fill type mining method and costed the operation, and then did an economic evaluation on the property. Economically, it was much closer than the other properties, but still not over the hurdle for Honduras. But from that point on, Bernie and I worked very closely together on various prospects, usually over the phone or through the mail.

The Emerald Isle Experience

In August 1974, Dr. Tom Walthier, St. Joe’s director of exploration, got word that the Irish government wanted to sell the Avoca copper mine, near Wicklow. This mine had operated as the Christmas Mine by a Canadian group for many years, before the company went bankrupt. It is one of the ancient mines that are so numerous in Ireland, mined by the old men using Cornish lifts and pumps. Many of the old Cornish structures still remain on the landscape. At this time, there was a real resurgence of mining taking place in Ireland, but these recent discoveries were Mississippi Valley–type, lead/zinc deposits. St. Joe was not a part of the discovery, but we were interested in getting into Ireland so, I started compiling information on Avoca. First, we went to Toronto late in 1974 for a meeting with the Canadian group that had previously operated the mine. Part of their problems were not mining related, but rather related to the Irish government, and labor contracts that were particularly onerous. Their reported reserves and exploration potential looked promising, so we felt like it deserved further investigation.

We employed a consulting geologist, Neil Campbell, who specialized in volcanigenic, massive sulfides, such as this deposit. In February of 1975, I headed to Ireland with Tom Wathier, my boss Peter Nalle, Bernie Bernstein, and a geologist and metallurgist whose names I don’t recall. We flew into Dublin and drove south to the Vale of Avoca. The drive itself was lovely, but it didn’t prepare us for the beauty of the Vale of Avoca. Ireland was everything I had always heard: beautiful, green rolling hills, and meadows with rock hedgerows marking the land plots.

Our first stop in the valley was the abandoned open-pit cooper mine, unused for many years. It was extremely deep, and very narrow. I have never seen final pit walls so steep; they looked to be 65 to 70 degrees, indicating that, at least in this area, the wall rock was very strong. Then we went to the mine office, where we met the operators that were presently just maintaining the mine since it had shut down. After getting acquainted, they immediately gave us a complete mine and plant tour, which took most of the first day. They arranged for us to stay at a small local motel, where our group completely filled the place. We each had a sleeping room on the first floor, and there was a large room upstairs where we could all work in the evenings and on weekends. Its homey restaurant served good food, including fresh Dover sole and Irish soda bread. It was my first experience with both, and I loved them. Our entire crew all ordered the same thing; fortunately, they had enough for everyone.

The next day we started evaluating the operation in earnest. I studied the mining method, the mining equipment, the ground control, the reserves being mined, the mine cost, the mine recovery, and mine dilution. Later, when all of the estimates were pulled together, I conducted an economic analysis to determine the net present value and internal rate of return. Since we were in Ireland, and transatlantic calls back to Rolla were expensive, I had to do the economic discounted cash flow analysis by hand, using the iteration method and a hand calculator.

We first studied the geology and reserve picture, and everything seemed to be in order. It was obvious to me that the Canadians were trying to run the operation at a higher daily tonnage than what the mine could support; therefore, they were mining much lower grade material than they should have been just to keep the mill full. There was nothing wrong with their mining method. In fact, they had been innovated a pillar recovery method which has become known as the Avoca Mining Method which has been used in many other places.

I presented some ideas to the group to make the operation more profitable, at least for a while, until we had time to do more exploration and find more ore. There was an area in the upper portion of the old mine where high-grade lead and zinc mineralization had been blocked out. My idea was to cut back on the copper circuits in the mill and turn portions of it into lead and zinc circuits, ending up with a mill that produced three products. Since the metals were isolated, this would not have been hard to do. We examined the area in the old mines where the lead and zinc resource were left, and it looked very competent for mining. (Competent rocks are those in which an unsupported opening can be made.) We took a few samples, which were eventually sent back to St. Joe’s metallurgical testing facilities in Viburnum. If the recovery was proven to be good, the idea appeared feasible, so I constructed my economic feasibility analysis and cost estimate to reflect a reduced scale of cooper mine production, but an added lead and zinc production. The preliminary (fatal flaw) analysis showed a return that was above the St. Joe hurdle rate, so after about 10 days in Avoca, we were ready to head home until the metallurgical tests could be completed.

We didn’t get to do much sightseeing in Ireland; we were working at least 16 hours a day. For the first four or five nights, we ate the delicious fresh Dover Sole at the little motel restaurant. One afternoon, we wanted to see where the mill was depositing its tailings. It was through a pipeline that continued 15 or 20 miles, toward the city of Waterford on the southeast coast. So, we all loaded into cars and drove down to the tailing area, examined the tailing area, where everything seemed to be in order.

As a break from work, we decided to continue on down to Waterford and visit the famous crystal and glass manufacturing plant and then have dinner in town. It was of course a very interesting site to visit, and it was nice to eat somewhere different for a night. However, we forgot to tell the restaurant owner that we would not all be dining with him that night. Apparently, in order to have enough fresh Dover Sole for us each night, they had been traveling over to the coast each day and bringing it back. That day they were stuck with seven or eight portions that they didn’t sell, so they asked us to let them know from then on when we would be eating with them, and when we wouldn’t be.

There were a few shops in town where we could buy local linen and wool, and we all bought a few things to take back to the states. One Sunday morning, Peter and I took another break and drove the little sports car he’d rented for several miles in every direction around Avoca, in about a 30-kilometer radius. It was fun, but we got terribly lost. The roads were not the same as the map showed them to be, and while there were numbers and letters on the map, the actual roads had no marking. When you asked someone for directions, they would just refer you to drive in a certain direction for so many kilometers till you pass this farmhouse, then turn at the next intersection and go until you pass so and so’s farm, etc. etc. No one seemed to be aware that the roads were supposed to have numbers on them. Nonetheless, it was an interesting trip. I was hoping to get close to one of those old Cornish lifts (winding/hoist) or pump houses, but we didn’t.

One morning near the end of our stay in Avoca, we took another side trip. The mine owners owned a very nice cottage, reserved for the operations manager. Peter and Tom took me there with the mine’s manager, who lived elsewhere in town, and showed me where I would be living if the deal went through to buy Avoca. This was the first that I’d heard of this plan. My wife and I had thought that we would be moving to Fairfield, but now, maybe we would be moving to Ireland for a few years. I was apprehensive about how Ruth would feel about that, but I certainly would have enjoyed the country and the challenge.

We returned home through Dublin on a Tuesday evening. Tom and Peter had gone to Dublin a day ahead of us to meet with the Irish government to start negotiations, which lasted two days. It all looked pretty good at that point. We all had a great celebration at the fancy international hotel. The next morning, I wanted to go downtown to buy something for Ruth and the kids. As I was hailing a cab, who should I run in to but my old boss from Gilman, Colorado, New Jersey Zinc (NJZ), Bob Radabaugh. He was by then the exploration manager for NJZ, and, of course, a competitor to St. Joe Minerals in lead and zinc production. Of course, you absolutely never discuss with a competitor what you are doing in a particular place at any given time. So, there we stood, greeting each other like long-lost brothers, but only discussing the beautiful weather of the day. I felt so stupid and so did he. Of course, he was there looking at potential lead-zinc exploration; we knew that NJZ was involved with exploration there. But it was a very funny situation.

Saying an awkward goodbye, I caught my cab and headed downtown. When I got there, I was suddenly aware that everyone had a grayish-brown spot on the middle of their forehead. It suddenly hit me: this was Ash Wednesday and I was surrounded by 100% Catholic population in a country that was in the midst of a revolution of sorts between Catholics and Protestants. (Check your history books: there was great turmoil in Ireland during the spring of 1975). I must confess, I chickened out. I ducked into an alley and got some dark looking grease off the pavement on my finger and put some on my forehead. I know, what a hypocrite!—but I can’t always depend on my guardian angel to bail me out. So, I disguised myself as a Catholic in order to stay out of trouble. I was so nervous, that as I recall, I didn’t find much to take home. This isn’t to say that Dublin was a violent place; quite the contrary. The night before, we had all left the hotel for a long walk and noticed the hundreds of young people, some women by themselves, all walking around after midnight. Most were bar hopping. But in the day light I felt so conspicuous, being the only obvious Protestant around.

This was not the end of my problems. When we headed home, we all went to the airport and checked in. You had to show your passport and ticket to get a boarding pass. There were St. Joe people ahead of me, and behind me. After we got our boarding passes, we went to the duty-free shop to look around for bargains, and then boarded the plane. As we were coming into JFK, we all had to fill out the U.S. Customs cards…and I realized that I no longer had my U.S. Passport. Apparently, I had stuck it in my hip pocket at the ticket counter, and it must have been stolen in the duty-free shop. Now, try getting back into this country without a passport! They were not interested in my new Connecticut driver’s license, my old Missouri driver’s license, my Viburnum library card, or any of my half-dozen credit cards. Fortunately, at the time I was a member of the United States Department of Interior Executive Emergency Reserve, and I carried a U.S. Government-issued card with my picture on it—and that’s what got me back into the United States.

The problem didn’t end there. Now I had to get a new passport. The State Department was not at all sympathetic with the fact that probably some Irish rebel now had a U.S. passport. In the first place, they would not issue me a passport for three months. Then they fined me $150 before they issued me a new passport and wrote me a scathing letter for being irresponsible enough to lose my passport. Boy what a lesson to learn. Believe me, in all my subsequent trips overseas, I never lost another passport.

As a result, when several of the Avoca project group returned to Ireland two more times for negotiations, I wasn’t able to join them to recalculate the effect of each negotiation on the economics of the investment. Unfortunately, negotiations with the Irish government did not go well, and in the final analysis, they insisted that St. Joe assume many of the old debts incurred by the prior owner. Also, the labor group could not be reduced at the mine/plant operation when the new owner took over. This meant that the operation could not make a return on the investment, and it ended St. Joe’s Avoca adventure (and the Bullocks potential move to Ireland). In fact, the mine never opened again. The Irish government was so embroiled in the social supported system, that it continued to have a tough time competing for capital investment on the international markets. An exploration investor would need to hit a real bonanza, and even then, in my opinion, the Irish government and the Irish labor group presented a risk that would eventually ruin any mineral development investment in the long run.

Meanwhile, I still had projects to oversee back in Mining Research. We had worked long and hard on developing all-hydraulic-powered drilling, and now the first jumbos were being built. I had written the basic specifications for these jumbos, so I flew to the new Ingersoll-Rand (I-R) plant in Seattle on a weekend to examine their assembly. My tight schedule meant I could only visit the plant on a Sunday, and the Ingersoll-Rand people were gracious enough to accommodate me. Since the plant was shut down, it actually was a good time to look at the equipment. I had no way of testing anything, but from what I observed, all seemed well. The first three jumbos were almost ready and would soon be shipped to the Viburnum area. (Photo 19-1)

Photo 19-1 The Ingersoll-Rand all-hydraulic drill jumbo. It was the first all-hydraulic drill used in U.S. mines.

Gold in the Them Thar Hills

As I mentioned in Book 1, St. Joe had acquired a dredging company, and with it, the employment of the company’s owner, Bill Breeding. We now had dredging operations in South America and in California, including two dredges operating on the Yuba River. Breeding and our geologist, John Hodas, were examining the San Juan Gold Fields in the Yuba River watershed, north of Grass Valley, California. There were many hundreds of acres leased and the gold gravels were in the same area that had been mined with giant monitors (high-pressure water cannons) in the 1800s. That method of mining was to blast high-pressure water through large water cannons and against the banks of gold-laden gravels and wash the banks of gravels through sluices. Of course, the water picked up the fines and silts and traveled through sluices, which caught most of the gold. Afterward, the water laden silt was allowed to run into the nearest stream—in this case, the Middle Fork of the Yuba River.

The mining in the area stopped suddenly. The water monitor method had brought on the first environmental pollution laws in the U.S., because of all of the damage it caused to the downstream rivers and valleys. Therefore, much of the gold was still there, although it was extremely low grade. Still, if there was sufficient gold, a dredge could be operated on a moving pond, or a dry land dredge could be used to process the gold. The problem was that the gold-bearing formation was covered by at least 100 feet of worthless gravels, which would have to be moved by other methods. I was sent out to assist in evaluating the mining schemes we could develop. This was a very interesting location: The gold strike of 1849 had started south of this general area, around Sutter Creek, and then Newmont had operated its Empire Gold mine just south of our location for 50 or 60 years. Plus, there were dozens of smaller gold mines, and of course the giant monitor mining, which was world renowned, but remained a thorn in the mining industry’s side. The land where the monitors worked was a real environmental problem. To this day it’s like a moonscape: Nothing will grow on the gravels that were left.

It was a real treat for me to be working in an area were such historic mining had taken place nearly 125 years before. This was one of the most famous mining areas in the Western hemisphere, but unfortunately, the damage that the old-timers had done with the water cannons was irreparable by nature. The other interesting thing was that the town in the area: Nevada City had become the final retreat for many folks from the hippie era. It was a beautiful area, and there was no way that the proposed mining would in any way change the looks of their city, because the sites were not that close together. In spite of the fact that, upon completion, St. Joe planned to beautify the moonscape that now existed, these people became extreme eco-activists, in opposition to it. They brought in national environmental groups to fight against local, state and national authorities granting permits for surface mining.

This was a new attitude to me. They were opposed to our mining, even though it was going to clean up the scars left from previous mining operations. These people were simply against mining and wanted to use our past sins to try to keep us from even correcting problems of the past. They didn’t want to make mining look good.

I worked up a plan for removing the upper gravels very cheaply by using wide-curved blade dozers, Chinaman chutes, and trucks. (A Chinaman chute, in those less racially sensitive times was the nickname for an inexpensive structure at the base of a hill, where a dozer could push broken material or gravel onto the top of the structure, which would allow the material to fall directly in to the truck without requiring loaders.) Breeding developed the plan for dry land dredging. The project projections, depending on the drilling that would be necessary, looked like it could be a profitable mine that could meet St. Joe’s investment hurdle rate. After mining, the area would be smoothed out, with enough topsoil brought in and mixed in so that it would support vegetation once again. This seemed like a good plan to us, so I left the area and awaited more exploration and environmental baseline studies to be run.

Trying to Get into the Tungsten Market

St. Joe’s president and CEO, Jack Duncan, had come from W.R. Grace and Company, and still had connections there. Tom Walthier had been talking to people at W.R. Grace about properties where they had performed exploration drilling, including the Pilot Mountain property in Nevada. W.R. Grace had paid for a preliminary feasibility study for tungsten on this property by a major, world-class consulting group, and since St. Joe was looking to get into the tungsten business, it was furnished to me for evaluation. It looked good enough on paper that I wanted to see the property for myself, to make sure everything was as correctly described by the engineering firm. The long-hole, open-stoping mining method that was to be used required very strong rock to keep from diluting the ore with waste rock. The tungsten ore was not so high-grade that it could tolerate more than 10 percent dilution from the waste rock. The consultant’s report had estimated 5 percent dilution, a figure I was suspicious of.

Prior to visiting the mine, I traveled to an older tungsten mine at Bishop, California. It was no longer operational, but it was being kept open on care-and-maintenance basis. Unfortunately, there was a power failure the morning that I arrived, which kept me from going inside (the ventilation had been off, so the radon levels were unsafe). Instead, I was treated to a rare trip through their tungsten process plant, which few visitors ever got to see. This gave me information I would need to plan and cost a process plant if the Pilot Mountain property proved viable.

Pilot Mountain’s geologist met me at the mine site. We crawled into an abandoned diggins, (the opening left from an old mine) and the rock looked competent and solid near the surface. I asked to see cores from the drilling, and he took me to a little wooden frame shack that was filled with core boxes stacked to the ceiling. He started showing me what the company wanted me to see, and again, it looked good. But I wanted to see specific core samples from the middle of an ore block and in the hanging wall—the rock above the vein—above some of the big, projected deep stopes. So, I gave him a drill hole number and the elevation that I wanted to look at. He was shocked that I would ask to see a particular hole.

The first sample I wanted to see was at the very bottom of a big stack of core boxes, and he said it would probably take 30 to 40 minutes of moving boxes completely out of the shack just to get to it. I didn’t back off: I wanted to see the core from that hole. The indication from the stope layout was that ore and the country rock were very strong, and therefore the core should have been unbroken, in very long lengths. When we finally opened the core box, there was not one piece of it longer than 1.5 inches. The core length and general condition of the core indicated that this rock was nothing like what the consultant had characterized as competent rock. I looked at several other boxes for confirmation, and while they were not as bad as that first box, they were not competent enough in my opinion to justify an open-stope mining method. The consulting engineering firm had grossly understated the mining cost and metal dilution that had been projected on this property. When the correct mining method and cost was placed into the evaluation equations, the property did not meet St. Joe’s hurdle rate. That was the end of the tungsten project for St. Joe.

Death Valley, and the Widow Mine Episode

It was still 1975, and fiberglass communication lines were starting to go into widespread use. One of the minerals that was required to make fiberglass strong was a borate mineral called colemanite.

The company that really controlled the borate business was the California/Nevada operation, U.S. Borax. However, Tenneco had also made some entries into the mineral business and was operating a borate pit on the Nevada side of the Death Valley National Monument. It was in the Amargosa Desert and looked only slightly better than Death Valley itself. It was a fairly small pit by mining standards, and the high walls were not more than about 40 to 50 feet. Yet, because Death Valley tourists would drive by the mining operation, the property had begun getting some unfavorable publicity.

Tenneco had been doing a lot of exploration drilling and they had discovered a very good colemanite deposit close to their borate operation, buried about 700 feet deep. The company named it the Billie Orebody. As soon as the new underground mine got going, Tenneco would be finished with the surface and could reclaim the area (restoring the land to its natural state). But before that could happen, ecoactivists contacted 60 Minutes and the program aired an exposé of the open pit-raping the earth scene and tried to disgrace Tenneco, which had made this so-called terrible scar on this National Monument. Within weeks, Tenneco had decided it wanted out of the business; its retail oil and gas business could not stand the bad publicity. That’s when St. Joe stepped in.

I looked at the drilling Tenneco had done on the Billie Orebody, and it looked very good. I started studying it from a mining point of view but wasn’t certain of the strength of the ore; there was some indication that some of the areas were structurally very weak. St. Joe’s exploration geologist discovered that U.S. Borax had once operated a colemanite mine, called the Widow Mine, in Death Valley; it had closed in the late 1920s. Nonetheless, the Widow Mine still stood open after all of these years. I wanted to see it, but we didn’t want to get into a bidding war, so we could not let U.S. Borax know that St. Joe was interested in becoming a competitor to them, no matter how small.

As we saw it, we had only one course of action: We decided to walk through Death Valley to get to it. It was August, and daytime temperatures were about 120 degrees in the day, so a midnight reconnaissance mission seemed to make the most sense. We had maps of the area around the mine, so it was just a matter of following the old arroyo—a steep-sided gully—into the correct area. We left our vehicles on the main highway and started hiking. I had on leather boots, but I was still afraid we would run into a rattlesnake or two. Therefore, I grabbed a tire iron to fend the darn things off if we saw any.

And then there was the mine’s name: The Widow Mine. We had assumed it came by the name because some miners had been killed in the mine. We found out the real story firsthand. As we got closer to the mine, we suddenly ran into hundreds of spiderwebs between the brush that grew along the narrow arroyo. These were not just any innocuous spiders. These were poisonous black widow spiders: hundreds of them. I suddenly realized; my tire tool was not much of a weapon against poisonous spiders. (Thanks to my Guardian Angle, I had not walked into the webs, were I could have been bitten by the Black Widow spiders. We were many hours from any emergency help had we needed it.) We immediately got out of the arroyo and give it a wide birth.

The hike to the mine took about an hour and a half; we must have hiked five or six miles. Even after midnight, the temperature was still over 100 degrees. The mine, of course, was boarded up, and posted with No Trespassing signs, but we had come too far to be denied. My tire iron came in handy. (Does the excuse that boys will be boys apply to really big boys?)

Entering the mine was a delightful experience to a mining engineer. Here was a mine that had been shut down in the 1920s, and everything was just like the day the final crew had walked out.