The Atlantic City Iron Mine

Old trees in the tailings at the Atlantic City iron mine (Fall 2014).

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Atlantic City, on South Pass at the southern end of the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, is well known for historic gold mines, but there is also a huge abandoned iron mine there called the Atlantic City Iron Mine that was owned by U.S. Steel.  Iron pellets were shipped to Utah for processing while the mine was active.  It operated from 1962 until 1983 and left behind a pit filled with water and huge piles of taconite tailings that have been the target of reclamation efforts under the Abandoned Mine Land (AML) reclamation program.  WyDOT still uses waste rock from the site for roads and rip rap, but mostly the site sits empty.  

I've driven past the mine many times and even stopped to look over the barbed-wire fence at it, but had never walked around in there until last fall (2014), when I jumped the fence to shoot some photographs of the black tailing piles, now partly covered with sparse plants that are hearty enough to grow on taconite at 8,000 feet above sea level. 

A 2012 article in County10.com gave the mine a “5 to 10 percent chance” of reopening to extract substantial iron that is still in the pit, but when I was there in the Fall of 2014, there was no activity.

Reference:  Gusek, James J. and Timothy C. Richmond.  1998.  Mining Engineering 50(4):33-38. 

The view into the pit from atop one of the tailing piles.

A brave lodgepole.

Rabbitbrush and tailings.

Dead lodgepoles and live rabbitbrush.

Plants in the tailings.

Inadvertent sculpture.

Please DO.

Tires.

Tailings and blue water.

Tailings with piles of tailings.

Tailings with piles of salt.

Salt with piles of tailings.

Abandoned equipment.

Empty Space

An abandoned ranch cabin on the Bar X Road, deep in the Red Desert.  

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Many of us who have lived in Wyoming for a long time but weren’t born  here (and some that were) notice from time to time how lucky we are.  Imagine how many people can’t imagine living in the mountains, or driving 15 minutes to go skiing or mountain biking, or that the Red Desert exists.   Imagine antelope being exotic or not seeing storms or the lights of home fifty miles away.

Earlier this fall, I camped one weekend with Ed Sherline (another photographer) near the Oregon Buttes, a landmark on the Oregon Trail.  Migrants traveling west along what now are just wagon ruts through the sagebrush were probably less romantic about all of the open space and the badlands, but Ed and I both grew up “out east” and noted after we left our camp and were driving home that we had traversed more than fifty miles of territory without seeing another car or an occupied dwelling. 

Remnants of an old mind near South Pass, near the Sweetwater River.

Antelope.

Sandstone on the southern flanks of the Oregon Buttes.

The Oregon Buttes, viewed from the south.  On the Oregon Trail, these marked the passage into Oregon territory.

Badlands south of the Oregon Buttes.  

Badland erosion.

The view southwest from atop badlands south of the Oregon Buttes.

Wild horses south of the Oregon Buttes.

Coyote taken at the same cabin as in the lead photo.  

The Bar X road with typical traffic.

A very long, but not very watery watering trough.

Red Desert highway.

Desert elk, south of the Bar X Ranch, heading for the sand dune in the distance. 

Canyoneering: Capitol Reef

Steve Millard setting up an awkward rappel in Pandora's Box.  You are standing on the chockstone anchor.

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I’m not proud of this, but I ate an entire package of beer brats the night before Steve and I headed into Pandora’s Box, a famously skinny Wingate slot canyon in Capitol Reef National Park.  Steve, equally hedonistic, tucked into a couple of big burgers, and we both washed down our meals with margaritas (me) and wine (Steve).  This was a cocky move, since we were already anxious about being too fat to fit through the canyon.  Famously, one large canyoneer had become stuck in Pandora’s Box, requiring a helicopter rescue that arrived not long after he drank his own urine to stave off dehydration. 

I felt periodically nauseated throughout the next day, which began for us at 4:15 a.m. after a night of fitful, anxiety-plagued sleep, but as it turned out we neither got stuck nor had to drink our urine.  In fact, the canyon went more easily than we anticipated with only a little strenuous chimneying over narrow spots and a few episodes of laying on our sides in the mud to wriggle through low passage where it was slightly wider.  We completed the last two rappels by 1:15 and began the long and exhausting hike back over Meek’s Mesa to our camp, arriving in time to eat dinner (no brats!) and visit with Larry Scritchfield, who had arrived that day from Arizona to meet other friends for a week in the park (Steve and I had to return to work). 

While in the Capitol Reef area, Steve and I warmed up in a couple of the disappointingly short, but pretty “Wives” (side canyons that drain into the popular Cohab Canyon) above the Visitor’s Center on Saturday before grappling with Pandora’s Box on Sunday.  The Blue Gnome provides painstakingly detailed beta for all of these canyons, so I won’t repeat it, but I’ll post a few pictures—I felt too busy in Pandora’s to take many, and it was so narrow that much of it was fairly dark.

Campsite, Pandora's Box trailhead.

Steve Millard following intricate Blue Gnome directions to the beginning of Wife #3.

Beginning the 200' rappel into the head of Wife #3.

Wife #3.

Rappeling in Wife #3.

Deadman rappel anchor in Wife #5

Wife #5

Wife #5.

The exit rappel from Wife #5.

Steve hiking down from The Wives.

Sunrise at the drop-in for Pandora's Box.

Awkward rappeling in Pandora's.

A textbook rappel anchor.  

Resting in a wide spot in Pandora's Box.

Steve, showing off the physique that somehow managed to squeeze through Pandora's..

Me near the end of Pandora's.  Another pair of canyoneering shorts destined for the dumpster at the Capitol Reef V.C.

Back to the Salt Mines

The salt mine at Walvis Bay, Namibia.

As mid-August arrives, the idiom “back to the salt mines” comes to mind as I feel the gnawing need to prepare for fall teaching and to catch up on all of the other work that I’ve neglected since June, when summer seemed infinite.  Of course, it’s a stretch to equate a university teaching job that has great benefits and summers off with working in a salt mine, though later in the semester, when it comes time to grade 40 undergraduate research papers, I might think fondly about big white piles of salt waiting to be shoveled into trucks.    

There’s all kinds of speculation on the web about the origin of the phrase.  The common theme is that working in salt mines isn’t at the very top of the career ladder for most people, and that the work is dangerous, arduous, repetitive, and unpleasant.  Many accounts reference a particular salt mine in olden Siberia, used as a prison by a cruel Russian ruler.  Workers there were reportedly flogged to death for not working hard enough (denial of tenure?). 

Even the word “salary”  (Latin salarium) apparently has “salt” at its root, and the expression “worth his salt” is based on payment to Roman soldiers in salt, a valuable commodity in those days. 

An article by Natalie Houston in the Chronicle of Higher Education laments the increased use of this idiom by teachers as summer draws to a close and they prepare to go back to work.

“Each time you say something like “back to the salt mines” (which is usually accompanied by a shrug, or slumped shoulders) you reinforce your own attitudes about your workplace as being somehow like a dangerous mine where prisoners labor.  Sure, maybe you didn’t mean it, or not at a conscious level.  But if you think or say “salt mines,” “salt mines,” “salt mines,” several times a day, you’re probably not going to be feeling lively, energized, or creative. “

But a comment on the article notes that, “While work may not be killing them in one fell swoop, the cumulative effects of email, being available by mobile, insomnia, high stress, eating lunch at one’s desk, etc., don’t seem to add to life expectancy either.”

I had the good fortune to visit actual salt mines in Namibia this summer, and though I wouldn’t want to work there, they seemed like reasonable workplaces in general.  The Namibian mines I saw were located on the Skeleton Coast and they were evaporative rather than underground.  The biggest mine, south of Swakopmund at Walvis Bay covered a vast area of salt flats where salt from evaporative ponds was gathered by big bulldozers, cleaned at a salt refinery, and loaded into trucks for shipment.  The seawater here is supposedly especially good for salt, because the cold Benguela Current flowing northward up the coast is unpolluted.  

A news article in “The Namibian” says that the Walvis Bay mines produce about 780,000 tons of coarse industrial salt and 60,000 tons of table salt each year. That’s enough to raise your blood pressure more than a back-to-school ad in the local paper.

Salt, Walvis Bay.

Evaporation pond, Walvis Bay.

Salt road.  Atlantic Ocean on the left, salt ponds on the right.

Salt for sale.  Cape Cross, Namibia.

Salt for sale, Cape Cross.

Cape Cross.

Cape Cross.

Salt mine, Walvis Bay.

Unclimbed salt peak, Walvis Bay.

Salt evaporation, Walvis Bay.

A familiar Laramie scene, but here it's salt not ice, and the temperature was in the 90s.

Salt truck repair shop, Cape Cross.

The Atlantic Ocean, where the cold Benguela Current brings clean salt to the Skeleton Coast.