Mining at Alta: A Further Look

Mining at Alta: A Further Look

BY JAMES H. LEVITT, PHILIP F.NOTARIANNI, AND BARBARA BANNON

MINING HOLDS AN IMPORTANT place in the history of Alta, Utah, today one of the major ski areas in America. Many who know of Alta, skiers and nonskiers alike, are aware of some of its early mining history. They know that in the early 1870s as many as five thousand persons occupied the area in a quest for silver and lead. They have heard of the fabulously rich Emma mine and of the scandal that followed its sale to English investors. Some may also be aware that mining, dormant after 1885, was revived in Alta at the turn of the century with the report of several large strikes and then, as the hoped-for wealth failed to materialize, died out again by the twenties. Few are aware, however, that sporadic attempts to extract wealth continued into the 1960s; for these operations were small, required little capital, and achieved no major finds. Because these ventures attracted so little notice, there are few written accounts with which to reconstruct this aspect of Alta history. The following edited interview is with Page Blakemore, a mining engineer who purchased some of the mining rights in the Alta area during the last decade and began a series of explorations. At the same time, he was involved with remining the old tailings or dumps. Here he provides some information through oral history about this aspect of mining in the area as well as about the future of mining at Alta.

Interviewer: When did the mining of the dumps or tailings actually begin?

Mr. Blakemore: Well I don't know the earliest dates. I assume it was mined prior to World War I, some of it, but I have no knowledge of this, The earliest I know was in the late '40s by Jay Jacobson who treated some of the dumps on the Flagstaff and treated some of the dumps on the Grizzly and Lavinia mines and a limited amount on the City Rocks mine, the latter three belonging to Michigan-Utah Mines Company.

Interviewer: What was he mining for?

Mr. Blakemore: Well, he was simply screening the dumps; since the ore minerals are practically entirely oxidized at Alta [they] . . . are . . . quite soft. He had a screening plant in which he screened the dumps and shipped the screened product directly to the smelter, so it was a very lackluster operation.

Interviewer: How did this screening process work?

Mr. Blakemore: He simply used a slusher, which is a hoe-like device pulled by cables, to slush the dumps down onto a screen, and then the oversize went to discard and the undersize went into a truck to the smelter. Interviewer: What was [Jacobson] mostly getting—lead? silver?

Mr. Blakemore: He was getting primarily lead and silver. The zinc content of those particular dumps is about 1/2 percent under the minimum the smelter will pay for; the smelter will pay for something like 12 percent and they run 11 1/2 [percent].

Interviewer: But there was then sufficient ore still in those old dumps to make it worth his while. Mr. Blakemore: That's correct. Interviewer: When did you begin to work these dumps?

Mr. Blakemore: Well, it was in the '60s—'64 probably and '65 and I shipped material for several years using exactly the same system that Mr. Jacobson used except that we put it on a conveyor . . . the material was moved by bulldozer and slusher . . . into a hopper, and the hopper had a feeder . . . [which] fed ... a regular belt loader about sixty feet long. . . . The belt carried it up onto a screen . . . hung over a truck. . . . The oversize went over the side of the truck and the undersize went in and then the truck went to the smelter and another pulled under the screen.

Interviewer: What smelter did it go to?

Mr. Blakemore: It was sold to U.S. Smelting who in turn sold it to International in Tooele.

Interviewer: Do you recall what percentages of minerals you got from that ore? Mr. Blakemore: I do not; all I know is that it made money. It's much more valuable now, about four times. . . . Interviewer: More valuable?

Mr. Blakemore: Yes, it was more valuable than Jacobson's shipments and [now it would be] more valuable ... as it is about four times the value that I shipped it at. Interviewer: Were you getting enough zinc out of that [to make it profitable]? Mr. Blakemore: We didn't get paid for the zinc. . . . Interviewer: Not enough zinc; so then it was strictly silver and lead. Mr. Blakemore: Well, that's what's paid for; it was zinc ore really but actually as far as the metallic contents [are] concerned, it was better than most zinc ores around the country but the smelter didn't choose to pay for it. Interviewer: Which mines were you working? Mr. Blakemore: The Grizzly and Lavinia. Interviewer: Do you have any idea how many tons you removed? Mr. Blakemore: No, I don't, several thousand tons. Interviewer: Do you remember what a ton was worth? Mr. Blakemore: No I don't, but I would imagine about 14-15 dollars. Interviewer: How many people did you employ in this operation? Mr. Blakemore: Three. Interviewer: Since it hasn't been mentioned, were the dumps at the Emma not worked during this period?

Mr. Blakemore: I should have told you and I forgot, but there are so many details about Alta, you know. The Emma dumps were worked prior to World War I.

Somebody ran some water around the hill in [a] pipe, probably from Grizzly Gulch and ran a jig plant just below the present road [not the paved highway at Alta but the dirt road above it which goes to what is called Michigan City], and they concentrated the area ore—because some of the ore they didn't even recognize—off the Emma dumps from the Emma tunnel, not the lower Emma, not the Bay City or anything, but the upper Emma tunnel which goes to the shaft. . . .

Interviewer: You mentioned a jig plant. What is it?

Mr. Blakemore: Well, a jig is a very archaic piece of equipment which is still in use. We are installing jigs in Nevada today, but it's a very archaic piece of equipment. I think it really came into its own in the Hartz Mountains [in Germany], and the jigs that they were using on the Emma dumps were Hartz-type jigs. Ore is sized more or less-—roughly sized—and passed over a box with a screen in it, and water is fed into the bottom of the. box through a clack valve, and a diaphragm is fastened to the back of the box which is driven by an eccentric. This creates a pulsating bed in the box, and the heavy materials go to the bottom; the fines go through the screen, and the heavys settle on the screen, and the waste goes over a weir at the end. It's quite an efficient method for concentrating ores, particularly when the gravity is as high as it is in some of the Alta ores; It's a hindered-bed settling process, [and it] was used extensively by hand in the tri-state area where they made a screen box and had a large tub. They simply put the crushed ore on the screen and fastened it by a bridle to a spring pole, a sapling cut and laid across a forked stick driven in the ground. They agitated this with a rope, which meant that they simply oscillated the box up and down in the water, and then they threw the chattel, the waste, off the top and saveH the lumps and then washed the stuff that went through the screen to concentrate the lead. So it is an old, old process. I really don't know how old but a couple of thousand years—the principal; naturally it has been mechanized.

Interviewer: I heard that in the early days copper was not considered to be valuable, and therefore, in the [18] 70s and '80s they threw all the copper out on the dumps and that after the turn of the century someone went back in and mined the Emma and some of the other dumps for the copper.

Mr. Blakemore: Not true. . . , There isn't any copper up there essentially; it is something like point four or something like that in the very best ore. . . . No, there was never any copper ore in there.

Interviewer: Any tungsten at all?

Mr. Blakemore: Yes, there's tungsten in several of the mines. The Emma has a very rare tungsten mineral. . . . It's tungsten sulfide. It's one of the few locations in the world. And there's quite a bit of tungsten in the Michigan- Utah area in copper ore that has tungsten and molybdenum both.

Interviewer: Sufficient to [make it profitable to mine?] Mr. Blakemore: No, small veins with scheelite in them. Interviewer: Why did mining cease at Alta?

Mr. Blakemore: The work was halted by the fact that there was no available market for the Alta ores. They can't be shipped anywhere because of the closing of the Tooele smelter, and the imminence of the closing of the smelter made further exploration at this time an uncommercial project. The ore isn't capable of being concentrated by any presently acceptable method, and until hydrometallurgical methods are designed to treat Alta ores or a smelter is constructed in the Salt Lake area . . . there isn't a lead smelter nearer than East Helena, Montana, and the freight rates plus truck hauling out of Alta isn't practical unless you make special arrangements. Until technology has improved in treatment of oxidized ores, it isn't practical to mine Alta ores. However, processes have been developed that are practical but that don't have sufficient industrial acceptance for anybody to be brave enough to build a plant, and so the ore at Alta that is controlled by us is going to stay there until we can get a suitable market for it.

Interviewer: Then, it would be possible for mining to start again at Alta if either technological changes make it profitable or a [lead] smelter were to begin again in the area?

Mr. Blakemore: That is correct. Interviewer: Do you foresee that in the future?

Mr. Blakemore: Well, yes I do. The Anaconda Company has developed a hydrometallurgy process for copper which they have installed at Butte [Montana] [with] which they are going to treat the ore from the Victoria mine which they presently have under development in the Dolly Varden [mining] district in Nevada. This is a hydrometallurgical process and there are others in use in Europe, particularly by the French and Italians, . . . which would be applicable to Alta ores. We have to remember that the prices for lead and zinc are much higher than they have ever been and that silver is at an all-time high, and these are the principal ore resources of Alta. Something more than 60, almost 70 percent of the zinc that is used in the United States is corning from foreign countries, and Alta has large amounts of zinc and large amounts of lead and silver. Both these metals are in considerable demand now; so the pressure of necessity, of obtaining these metals domestically, is almost a foregone conclusion, I think. It will create more interest in smelters and ore hydrometallurgical plants. The necessity in the Intermountain West is that plants be developed that are capable of treating an ore to make a finished product—a directly saleable product at the mine; and of course this is the value of the hydrometallurgy process. There are many in existence for copper and almost none for lead and zinc. That's about the economic picture as far as Alta's concerned.

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