Warm Springs Mine

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From the California Journal of Mines and Geology, Vol. 47, No. 1, Jan. 1951:

11 unpatented claims are owned by Miss Louise Grantham and associates, 809 E. 6th Street, Ontario, California. 2 claims, Warm Spring No. 5 and Highgrade, are under lease to Kennedy Minerals Company, Incorporated, 2550 E. Olympic Boulevard, Los Angeles, California.

The Warm Spring Canyon deposits are discontinuously exposed along a two-mile belt low on the south wall of Warm Spring Canyon in the southeastern part of the Panamint Range. All the belt lies east of Warm Spring Camp, which is about 2 1/2 miles west of the canyon's mouth.

The talc deposits of the Warm Spring Canyon area, like all of the others in the southern Death Valley-Kingston Range region, are in the Crystal Spring formation of pre-Cambrian age, and have formed at or near a contact between a diabase sill and lowermost carbonate stratum of the formation. Strats as far as 100 above the sill have been partly altered to talc, but the most complete alteration is confined to a zone adjacent to the diabase. This is the zone that is being worked on the two claims at the eastern end of the belt. In several places, however, the alteration has not produced commerical talc, and in other places the rocks that overlie the diabase are hidden beneath talus. Nevertheless the reserves of commercial talc in the Warm Spring belt appear to be among the largest in the state. In the area of the active workings, the zone of marketable talc consistently averages more than 13 feet thick, and has been worked as much as 500 feet along the strike with no marked variations in thickness or grade. Only a small part of the zone has been exploited.

The zone consists predominently of talc with subordinate carbonate material and little or no tremolite. The lower one-third to one-half of the zone is consistently fine-grained and thinly laminated but non-schistose. The upper part is coarser-grained and schistose.

Both Warm Spring No. 5 claim (Kennedy Minerals Company, Inc.) and Big Talc claim (Louise Grantham) have been worked in a similar manner. Adits are driven along the strike of the talc zone and connected by low angle (about 20°) raises. From these initial workings the talc is mined by a modified room-and-pillar system, utilizing compressed air slushers to move and load the broken material. At times, one slusher is set in a central position at the intersection of an adit and raise to move material from the adit as well as from the raise. The mechanization and mining methods have resulted in high-tonnage-per-manhour ration. The lower talc zone being worked has required little or no timbering, but an adit driven above this zone in the "middle bed" was abandoned because of the heavy roof and resultant caving.

Output from the deposit to January, 1950 was 32,700 tons of talc. The material is hauled by truck to Dunn, a siding on the Union Pacific Railroad 30 miles southwest of Baker, California.