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A Big Thanks to Chad Harold, Tonto National Forest Geologist and the Forest Service crew who took time out from their busy schedules to spend a day with TRAL in the Hewitt Station, Superior AZ area. We had a great turn out and it was great to see old friends as well as make some new ones. Chad provided a wealth of information. He went into great detail about the rocks and geology of the area and history of mining in the area, as well as how to spot mining claims. Chad spent some time explaining the on-going mining activities of Rio Tinto and others, which includes the drilling throughout the region of geo-technical and hydrologic wells for the purposes of monitoring ground water levels and the rock layers beneath.
The area where we were exploring is being considered as a possible storage location for the Rio Tinto block cave mine tailings, something ultimately to be about the size of Picketpost Mountain. Also fascinating was the process used to extract the copper form the crushed rock and the current state of copper processing in the USA. We traveled to several abandoned perlite mines and a collapsed mine that had an exposed chrysocolla vein. We finished at the Pinal City Cemetery at the grave of Mattie Earp.
Next up on the Discovery Trip list looks like Hydrology. Stay tuned...
From Chad the geologist:
"Thanks again for pulling this activity together.
I thoroughly enjoyed sharing my knowledge and look forward to continuing our relationship in the future."
A big thanks to Chad and the rest of the Tonto staff for helping put this together. I'm sad that I had to leave early but the intro to Hewitt area geology part was really informative.
We are working with the forest on more of these Discovery Runs. Ideally, we could do one of these a month. Watch the calendar for runs coming up in April and May.