Willow Creek District (Nye County)
Overview
Other Names: Nyala, Quinn Canyon
County: Nye
Discovered: 1911
Commodities: gold, silver, lead
Comments
Original locations in the Willow Creek district were made in the area of Willow Creek and Gold Canyons on the west side of the Quinn Canyon Range, near the present settlement of Nyala in Railroad Valley. This area, along with the Quinn Canyon fluorite district and the Sharp district on the east side of the range, was included by Kral (1951) and Kleinhampl and Ziony (1984) in a large Willow Creek district covering most of the southern Quinn Canyon Range.
References
Hill, 1916, p. 144; Lincoln, 1923, p. 198; Stoddard, 1932, p. 73; Lotz, 1934, p. 23; Kral, 1951, p. 212; Tingley, 1984, p. 44; Bonham, 1976; Wong, 1982, table 1; Kleinhampl and Ziony, 1984, p. 227; Stager and Tingley, 1988, p. 155
Willow Creek District (Pershing County)
Overview
Other Names: Yellowstone, Czar
County: Pershing
Discovered: 1865
Commodities: gold, silver
Comments
Located along Willow Creek and Spaulding Canyons. The Spaulding Canyon area is sometimes included in the Sierra district to the north. Perry’s 1865 map shows a Czar district located immediately south of the Oro Fino (Sierra) district, in the area of the present Willow Creek district.
References
Perry, 1865; U.S. Geological Survey, 1910, p. 519; Bonham, 1976; Johnson, 1977, p. 103
Willow Creek Placer District Description
Location
West flank of the East Range, Tps. 31 and 32 N., R. 36 E.
Topographic Maps
Dun Glen 15-minute quadrangle.
Geologic Maps
Ferguson, Muller, and Roberts, 1951b, Geology of the Winnemucca quadrangle, Nevada, scale 1:125,000.
Access
From Lovelock, 46 miles north on Interstate 80 to Mill City; from there, dirt roads lead southeast about 12 miles to placers near the headwaters of Willow Creek.
Extent
Placers have been worked near the headwaters of Willow Creek, west of the crest of the East Range (sees. 2 and 11, T. 31 N., R. 36 E.) Some placers may have been worked farther downstream where the creek trends east-west (sees. 32-35, T. 32 N., R. 36 E.). The gold is apparently concentrated in channel fill of varying widths near bedrock and is overlain by alluvium. In the SE1/4 sec. 11, in the upper part of Willow Creek where the three headward forks join to form the main creek, the overburden is from 15 to 30 feet thick.
Production History
Most placer activity took place between 1938 and 1964. Activity was concentrated at the Wadley placer mine (S1/2 sec. 11, T. 31 N., R. 36 E.) and the Thacker placer mine (N1/2 sec. 2, T. 31 N., R. 36 E.) . Small earth-moving equipment was used to deliver the gravels to a central washing plant. In 1949 and 1950, Wallace Calder mined gravels containing $1.85 and 24 cents in gold per cubic yard at the Wadley mine. Dragline operations were carried on during the period 1959-60 in the north-south-trending part of the creek between the Thacker and Wadley placer mines.
Actual production from the Willow Creek placers is substantially higher than indicated by the recorded production of 2,823 ounces. For many years, placer production was included with that from the Imlay district and probably also with that from the Sierra district.
Source
Gold-bearing calcite and quartz veins exposed near the headwaters of Willow Creek are, at least in part, the source of the placer gold in Willow Creek. Both the Wadley and Thacker mines are in gravels mapped as older alluvium of Quaternary age that form small basins in the upper part of Willow Creek. These gravels represent remnants of gravel deposition from an earlier erosion cycle, and the gold found under the thick overburden was probably deposited at the earliest stage of the cycle.
Literature
Ferguson and others, 1 95 1 : Notes mining activity in Willow Creek source of placer gold.
Mining Journal, 1939a: Reports plans to use small dragline at Willow Creek.
Southern Pacific Company, 1964: Locates placers in Willow Creek; depth of overburden; states that the area warrants further investigation.
U.S. Bureau of Mines, 1938-63: Placer-mining activity at Willow Creek; some years give amount of gravel treated and ounces of gold and silver recovered; names placer claims.
