Hope Mine & Amboy Salt Flats February 2015

The entrance of the long abandoned Hope Mine. 

http://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/show-mrds.php?dep_id=10027327

Yep trace uranium everywhere.

The (UV) light at the end of the tunnel. 

A giant mound of unrefined impure salt. Exactly what we need for fluorescence! Manganese co-activated with lead makes for a nice orangey red fluorescence.

Shortly after Cliff and I had met at the Princess Pat Mines trip I organized he organized one. He had seen some pieces of fluorescent halite from the Amboy salt flats on eBay that he wanted to collect. Quite crazy considering he lives in Nevada! That was about a 4 hour drive just to go prospecting for halite. I think that's what turned off all the people that I had emailed: the possibility that the trip would end with nothing being found. There were only two of us during this trip. The day started out with us going to Hope Mine, an abandoned uranium mine. Nothing too spectacular here so I focused a good amount on photographing.  

After that we went to the Amboy salt flats along route 66. Talk about a different landscape. Talk about a desolate area. The area had way too much salinity for anything to be able to grow or thrive off the land. I took several shots of the brine fields that were being cultivated. We eventually we found a discard pile that looked very different. This salt (NaCl/sodium chloride/halite) was noticeably different. It was white so we immediately thought to lamp it. Boom. A bright red fluorescence with plenty to pick from.  The trash (presumably the reason all this halite was in the discard pile) was also fluorescent but we didn't take those haha. Mission accomplished!