Exploring the storied chronicles of Nevada’s tungsten treasure hunters

STORY AND PHOTOS BY CHRIS COLLARD

Peering over the edge, my eyes slowly adjusted to the inky abyss below—a wormhole in the earth that seemed to spiral into oblivion. I glanced up at my traveling mates near the mouth of the crevasse, reaffirmed my snowy footing and carefully backed away to safer ground.

This was not a cave or natural grotto but a deep fissure formed by the hands of men with picks, shovels and dynamite. My friend, “Geology John” Mears, picked up a chunk of rock and began a short dissertation on its formation and elemental properties.

This was the Nightingale mine, one of a plethora of mines that pepper a range of mountains of the same name. I joined the group and listened. We were standing on “hallowed” ground—hallowed, that is, if you were a treasure hunter at the onset of World War I.

I had joined the Sierra Treasure Hunters for a journey into the rich history of northern Nevada. The previous morning, we had aired down the tires on the edge of the Winnemucca Dry Lake, a vast and arid expanse of alkali and silt. Above, high on the adjoining mountains, were tiered layers of horizontal steps such as those you might see on a lake shore in late summer. On the lake bed were hundreds of odd-shaped mounds resembling the aftermath of a mud-slinging battle between giants.

We gathered around John, who transported us to an epoch before the first Europeans set sail for the Americas, before Christ changed the world with his words and before the Egyptians laid cornerstones for the Great Pyramids of Giza. At that time, about 13,000 years ago, the spot on which we were standing would have been covered with 500 feet of water. Winnemucca is one of the many desiccated skeletons of ancient Lake Lahontan, an endorheic inland sea of the Pleistocene period that covered much of western Nevada. The mud blobs, which ranged from minute to massive in size, were remnants of steam vents in the lake’s floor.