North Star Mining Area

We joined the local rock club here in Yuma and went out in the KOFA wilderness on an outing with them.  This was the same area that Jim used to go out to when we volunteered at the wildlife refuge.   So most of what we saw Jim had already seen.  The top picture is of an arrastra.  This is where the rocks from the mine were ground by the two large stones you see inside the circle.   Mules were used to pull the stones around the circle so the rock could be crushed to help get the gold out.   

The second picture is of the Polaris mine.  It was called the Polaris mine because the point of rock at the top of the hill pointed to the North Star.   You can see the tailing pile from the mine in the middle of the picture where the pile of lighter colored rock sits.  The white building on the left is where the caretaker for the mine used to live.  Jim was out there with the maintenance supervisor from the refuge two years ago and they were looking at what it would take to redo the building to preserve it.  When we saw it this time it looked like nothing had been done to it yet.  I went into one mine shaft -- just stepped inside -- after many other people checked it out and it was full of core samples from the mine.  They would drill out pieces of rock and test them for gold content.  We assumed since there wasn't mining still going on that the test samples proved to be too poor.