Trailhead: 41° 1.808’N, 111° 53.851’W
Nance and Fanning Prospect: 41° 2.528’N, 111° 52.179’W
Knife Blade Rock: 41° 2.513’N, 111° 52.123’W
There is virtually no information about this prospect no matter where I looked. If anyone has any information at all about this prospect please let me know.
Don’t expect much from this prospect. Just enjoy the canyon and the creek as you make your way to the prospect.
The trail starts off the same as Bair Canyon.
Go up Bair Canyon and you will cross the creek three times. The first time you will cross is towards the mouth of the canyon where there is a wooden bridge with concrete bases. After you pass the main campsite in Bair Canyon you will eventually cross back over the creek and hike around the pine trees. After another ways you will come to another primitive campsite with a fire pit. The trail crosses back across the creek for the last time.
Cross over the creek and head up the trail about 50 yards or so until you come to another stream.
Follow the stream for about 1/4 a mile, you will be bushwhacking through thorns and bushes, and climb up to the north side towards the rocks that you can see in the picture above about in the center and up to the left a little bit.
I have done much research about this mine and have found several different GPS coordinates for it’s location. Since there were discrepancies between the GPS coordinates I decided to check out all the possible locations.
I was bushwhacking around the area for a good 2 hours and didn’t find much in terms of mining activity. There were no adits.
It was also around this area that I found a giant hole underneath scrub oak roots. This hole was big enough that I could crawl through. I did not however attempt to go inside it because I found large cat-like footprints around the area, leading me to think that this is a mountain lion den. It makes sense because this is way off the trail and close to a high rock area that is hidden away. If you do come up here make sure you avoid this spot!
Once I reached the coordinates I crawled all over the rocks and found not much. I did however think I found a few cuts in the rock that appeared to be from old mining picks and chisels. But ultimately, there wasn’t anything here.
I took a picture of what appeared to be a very small tailings pile near one of the GPS coordinates.
The Nance and Fanning Prospect may have just been a claim where they didn’t really do much digging. Even though some of the internet sites where I gathered information from said that this was a copper mine, I didn’t even find much evidence for copper. I did find something interesting though.
After I thought my luck had run out I decided to go north above the prospect and see what I could find. I found a neat little pile (like someone had been collecting this stuff) of these flat shiny rocks that appeared to be shale but they are much MUCH more shiny looking than shale. Not sure what it is but it looks real cool!
Towards the creek side of the mountain still staying high on the rocks I found an interesting rock formation that looks like a knife blade.
Despite what the picture looks like this rock is large and it sticks out far over the cliff ledge and actually looks pretty cool.
It is an interesting rock because all the other rocks in the area lay horizontal but this rock is vertical. And you get a great view of Francis Peak and Bair Creek from here too.
