Sunflower Mine 5-29-05 (31 images)
This was a cool little trip. I was sitting at home bored this Sunday, so I decided to go out exploring.
The trail to Sunflower Mine is actually a 12 mile loop. The first 5 miles of trail to the mine is rated
easy/moderate. So getting to it wasn't to difficult. A couple rocky creek crossings and that's about it.
The second half of the trail is rated difficult. I don't like running anything rated difficult by myself,
so I went out the same way I came in. So anyways, the remains of the mining equipment and mine shafts is
awesome. Sunflower was a mercury mine. They would mine this ore called cinnabar. The cinnabar would be
broken down and then burned in these big U shaped pipes (see the pictures labeled sunflower_seperator)
which turned the mercury into gas. The gas would then cool and form pure mercury. The mine was abandoned
(I'm not sure exactly when) after the Viper Militia blew up a bridge leading to the mine. I didn't explore
the area for too long... but I did manage to find like 6 mine shafts. I will definitly be going back out to
Sunflower again when I have somebody to run the entire trail with.
Click a picture to see a larger view.
