Ring on the Wall

A ring on the wall of the old Key Mill, at the Centennial mine.

This was at the Centennial #3. Centennial had quite a history: it began by trying to mine the Calumet Conglomerate, which was making the Calumet & Hecla mine (immediately to the south) fabulously rich. Amazingly, the lode ran basically at the property line. Centennial didn't give up... the built full-out mines on two more lodes, before Homestake bought the mine and returned to the Conglomerate in the 1980's.

Homestake must have thought that it was promising... they even went so far as to build a mill (the "Key Mill") at the site, in some more or less featureless sheet metal buildings on the site. Unfortunately, the experiment lasted for only a year or two, and the mine has been shut down (and decaying severely) since then.

The mill was sold and torn down last year. However, not all of it is gone -- random cement pedestals and metal artifacts remain, standing in the late afternoon sun.