The Tungsten Hills

Eight miles west of Bishop, the road crosses a shelf of low hills before the Sierra Nevada rises in earnest. The hills top out around six thousand feet. They are dwarfed by the range behind them. That range runs to thirteen thousand. Nobody looks at the hills.

They are made of old granite, mostly reddish and gray, with patches of blackish rock scattered through like bruises. The black material is garnet. When the granite was young, hot gases came up through it and cooked the limestone layers into something else. Where the limestone took the heat just right, it converted to garnet and epidote and a mineral called scheelite. Scheelite is calcium tungstate. Tungsten lives in it.

For most of recorded time, nobody cared.

In 1913 three men were working placer gold in Deep Canyon, which cuts through the middle of the hills. Their concentrates kept coming out dirty. A heavy white mineral accumulated with the gold and wouldn't pan off clean. They spent time figuring out what it was. It was scheelite.

When they understood what they had, the search started for the rock it came from. Every piece of quartz float in the area got broken open and checked. A year and a half of that. Then a man named J.G. Powning went out hunting and shot a rabbit. The rabbit fell on an outcrop of garnet rock. He recognized the scheelite in it. The discovery claim was named Jackrabbit.

After that, prospecting became straightforward. Look for the black garnet masses on the bare hills. They contrasted against the gray and reddish granite and were easy to find. Stake them, pan them for scheelite. Ore turned up at many places.

The ore was invisible to most eyes. Milk-white particles in a dark matrix, small and inconspicuous. Engineers who examined the largest ore body early on reported unfavorably on it. They couldn't identify the trend, couldn't measure the width and length. They missed it entirely.

In 1916 the price of tungsten reached a level that made outside money interested. Two companies moved in simultaneously. The Standard Tungsten Co. acquired six claims and started work in April. By June they had roads, a tunnel, a mill running at thirty to fifty tons per day, and power lines brought in from Bishop Creek. All of that in sixty days.

The Tungsten Mines Co. owned fourteen claims to the north. They started May 1st. By mid-July they had a three-hundred-ton mill running and had thoroughly explored their main ore body. A hundred twenty-five men were on the payroll between the two operations. Someone laid out a town site at the bottom of the canyon and named it Tungsten City.

A federal geologist named Adolph Knopf drove out, examined the deposits in June of that year, and wrote them up for the USGS bulletin. His report is precise and unemotional. He recommended against undercutting the deposits by more than a hundred or two hundred feet at a time, since the ore-bearing limestone could terminate abruptly at any level. He also noted that the mills, running full, could produce in a single year as much tungsten as the entire pre-war United States output. He suggested this rate of production might deplete the known ore bodies faster than was advisable.

It did.

The Deep Canyon mines wound down. Other operators came through the 1930s and 1940s, reworking old tailings, running small mills. The hills gave what they had and that was that.

The bigger ore was up-canyon, in the Sierra proper. At Pine Creek, twenty-one miles northwest of Bishop at eleven thousand feet, a far larger deposit had been identified. The Pine Creek Mine started in 1918, grew through the war years, and by the early 1940s was the largest source of tungsten in the country. Four hundred miners worked it in three shifts around the clock. Workers rode trams two and a half miles into the mountain, then took elevators two thousand feet up through the dark.

In 2000, with ore prices too low and operating costs too high, Pine Creek shut down. The company town of Rovana was partially dismantled. The mine sits mothballed on the mountain. A caretaker tends it. A paved road runs up the canyon to the gate.

Back in the Tungsten Hills, the tailings piles from the old mines sit off the dirt road to Deep Canyon. The garnet rock is still there, blackish against the granite, if you know what to look for. The BLM manages the land. Mountain bikers use the trails.

The scheelite is still in the rock. Nobody is panning for it.