Abandoned mines are dangerous!  You explore at your own risk!

Note: A high clearance vehicle would be nice, but we didn’t have any troubles getting here in a sedan.  The road is wide, but just be careful if there were recent rains and snow.

The Nivloc mine was named after the first owner of the mining claims, “Colvin”, but they just reversed his name.  He owned this mine at about 1923 and it saw off-and-on again production for years to come.  At one point, the Nivloc Mine was the #1 producer of Silver in Nevada right before WWII.  The mine has 5 levels inside of it with many miles of tunnels.  It’s a large and complex mine and one you should admire from the outside.

The coolest thing about this mine and area is the trestle bridge.  There aren’t many original mining trestle bridges left out there in the wild so this is quite the gem!  Please do not take anything from this mine or area and just take a look at all the many interesting artifacts and take only pictures.  We did find lots of barrels that apparently contained cyanide, so be careful where you are walking and what you are touching.

From how nice the building is, we surmise that this was where the mine manager lived.  It has several rooms and even a basement.  The floors aren’t sturdy so we only recommend you take a peek inside.  The whole house was littered with ore coring samples.

The headframe is probably about 45 ft high.  The ore would be brought up by a large hoist and then put on small train cars.  The Nivloc Mine entrance is sealed and gated here.

Here is one of two buildings that had thousands of core samples.  All of them are labeled.

The trestle bridge is still in incredible condition!  It’s quite sturdy too, but we don’t encourage you to walk across it!  It’s about 120 ft in length and probably around 40 ft high.  The ore would be brought up at the headframe and then train cars would bring the ore across the bridge to the ore hopper to sift the bigger rocks from the ore.

The ore would be brought there and sifted and filtered through the ore hoppers and then brought to the mill for processing.

You can see tons of crucibles near the bridge.  Ore samples would be placed in the crucibles for small level smelting to test and see the ore contents.

Water storage

Tons of barrels of cyanide can be found littering the area.  We also found a pile of the lids.  Cyanide was used in the leeching process to get the gold to come out of the ore.

This is where I think the mill was located.  Nothing much remains besides a wooden water tank and the mill foundation.

Storage adit.  This building was the front to a very short adit that went in the mountain about 10 ft.

How would you like to use this outhouse with a view like that!

There are mine shafts and adits all over the place.  Be careful!  Some of them are hundreds of feet deep like this one!