Sean Watson

US Silver Mining

November 17th, 2006 at 01:05am Sean Watson

Well everyone I just finished my most difficult commercial job to date. I do numerous commercial jobs for Range and of their new clients is US Silver. This company came into the Silver valley (kellogg & Wallace, ID) and bought up most of the silver mines in the area. US Silvers main goal is to keep all of their mining companies right here in the great USA. Which is great because it saves lot’s of jobs locally and all across the US.

I won’t get into all the details but I was 4600 ft below ground! Where the humidity is 100% and the temperature with all the equipment is easily over 100 degrees! You can say that when I was done there wasn’t one dry spot on my clothing! I know, its gross but these images and the experience is amazing. These guy’s are hard workers and VERY nice guys. I dont think they make them like this anymore! HaHa

So I’ll explain a little about each image. This guy is drilling HUGE bolts into the rock with what apperas to be a chopped up car bumpers for a washer (for a lack of terms). These bolts along with the chain link fence keep the rock from falling from the ceiling. They also use this drill to create holes so they can blast the ore.

Here are a couple portraits for you.

This is called diamond drilling. These guys are drilling very long holes into the core of the rock. The purpose is to pull out rock cores from this area and determine if they should continue drilling and if so which way. Once they fill a tray of rock cores, the miners bring it to the surface. Then the geologist examine each section of rock cores to determine where the silver, copper or lead is going to be. This is really amazing!

What really amazed me was all the heavy equipment way down in these mines. They bring everything down peice by peice, in these small man lifts. It’ must take them months to get one of these big loaders down the mine. Then they have these huge workshops dug out where they assemble and fix all the heavy equipment. This was the only place where it wasn’t hot!

To finish it off……. a couple of my favorite interior shots.

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