Home | About Us | News | Our Supporters | Help Us | Anna Rechel | Rawhide History | About The Area | Photo Gallery What's there to do around here? For starters, check out the "human-scale" beginner to intermediate mountain climbing opportunities! There's Chicago, Buckskin, and Squaw mountains, and for the more experienced climbers, be sure to gear up for Pilot Cone - a perfectly formed cinder cone of pure volcanic rock. The views are absolutely wonderful from any of these summits. Believe it or not, the people who still live in and around the area have plenty of different recreational opportunities available to them. For example, nearby Walker Lake facilitates every kind of water sport as well as providing "the beach" experience. South of Rawhide is the Gabbs Valley Range - a beautifully forested area of Ponderosa pine trees, colorful canyons, and cold fresh water springs. Landsailing on the Gabbs Valley playa is excellent. For ATV enthusiasts, nearby Sand Mountain offers the ultimate sand dunes experience. And of course, rockhounding and hiking opportunities exist everywhere in all directions. This is friendly, colorful desert country. Get out there and enjoy it! Area Geology Most, but not all, ore deposits in Nevada are associated with igneous activity. In some cases, metals came from the magmas themselves, and in other cases, the magmas provided heat for circulation of hot water that deposited metals in veins and fractured sedimentary rocks. Some spectacular mineral specimens occur in ore deposits that formed when magmas intruded and metamorphosed sedimentary rocks. Even today, driven locally by deep circulation along faults and locally by igneous activity, hot water shows up in numerous geothermal areas. Nevada produces approximately $100 million worth of geothermally generated electric power annually, and geothermal resources also are used for agriculture, industrial applications, and space heating. Some rocks themselves are highly prized by collectors. An example is "wonderstone" (rock that is naturally stained with picturesque bands of red and orange iron oxide and hydroxide). In Nevada, some wonderstones are rhyolite lava flows, and some are sandstones. The wonderstone near Grimes Point in Churchill County, which is used in lapidary, is a rhyolite tuff that was altered by silica and pyrite from hydrothermal fluids. Other prize specimens come from sedimentary rocks, but often with an igneous or hydrothermal connection. For example, in Humboldt County precious opal occurs as a replacement of wood fragments in sediments with high contents of volcanic material. The silica needed to form the opal probably came from the silica-rich volcanic material in the sediments. Near Fallon, fossil fish are exposed in diatomite (diatomaceous earth) mines. The growth of diatoms, single-celled plants that comprise most of the rock diatomite, is promoted by volcanic activity that produced abundant quantities of silica, the chief ingredient of the diatoms. Nearly every rock type occurs in Nevada. With excellent rock exposures in the desert, generally good access to collecting localities on public lands, and fine tourist attractions in the towns, Nevada is a wonderful state for rock and mineral enthusiasts. Area Mapping - 1980 Click to view hi-res image Area Mapping - 2000 Click to view hi-res image We cannot display any detailed mapping of the Kennecott Minerals mining operation on this website. We can however, display current photographs of the area, so be sure and check out the photo gallery!