Comment
Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Clear view of the valley below and another stamp mill looming on the hill above. Wall Street Mill | Sandi Hemmerlein Wall Street Mill | Sandi Hemmerlein Lost Horse Mine | Sandi Hemmerlein Lost Horse Mine | Sandi Hemmerlein 4. Searles Lake, TronaDriving north of the Trona Pinnacles, you’ll see big piles of white along Highway 178 and what may look like a dry lakebed. The town of Trona itself may look like a ghost town – but with the formation of the Searles Valley mineral plant (formerly known as American Trona Corporation), Trona became, and still is, a company town. Trona has a rich history as a mining town, its primary source being that dry lake, whose natural minerals are abundant enough to create a number of salt compounds and boron products. Searles Valley Minerals harvests minerals from Searles Dry Lake and processes them at three local plants.The dry lake is full of minerals – mostly salt and boron – that can be processed into industrial and consumer products, such as compounds like borates (boric acid and borax) and sodium carbonate (soda ash) and sulfate – major ingredients in detergents and other cleaning products. In fact, Searles Lake contains one of the world’s richest deposits of naturally occurring minerals, with brine that's 10 times saltier than seawater. Raw minerals are trucked into the plants, where they’re dried out and bleached.The main plant is closed to the public – except open once a year, during the annual Gem-O-Rama event in the fall. That’s when you get to actually go out onto the dry lake and dig through the mud, salt, and brine to do a little “mining” of your own.But there are plenty of other ways to explore Trona’s mining history. You can learn all about how Trona relies heavily on rail to export its products at The Trona Railway Museum, which features a historic caboose, built and delivered to Trona in 1958, among its many displays. The Trona Railway (the short-line railway owned by Searles Valley Minerals) used it until the early 1980s – but now, you get to climb up into it to walk through mining history and imagine all of the freight that has been hauled, the missions it’s been on, and the distances it's traveled. The museum also features some rail- and non-rail-related industrial cast-offs, like a bag-printer machine and an 8-inch valve used in the
Add Comment