The Garvanza Mine sits in an unnamed canyon on the north slope of the New York Mountains. Few visitors find their way in, and the road does its best to keep it that way. The last mile is a slow crawl over large boulders, the hike is a wash scramble with no trail, and the site itself is a three-level operation on the east wall of the wash with foundations, ore chutes, an open adit, and a shaft still in place. The view back over the Ivanpah Valley to I-15 and the Ivanpah Solar towers is great.
Most of the published references that we came across group the Garvanza with the Cliff Canyon mines. The workings actually sit in a separate unnamed canyon a short distance east of Cliff Canyon proper. The two share the same flank of the New York Mountains and are often lumped together as one drainage system; on the ground they are separate canyons. Either way, the mine is associated with the Carbonate Group, a cluster of small workings nearby. The sources are split on whether the Garvanza belongs in the group or just sits next to it. Over its working life the mine produced silver, copper, gold, lead, and tungsten. Most everything is gone, but the workings, the mill site, and stone cabin ruins make a good afternoon of exploring.
History
The Garvanza was first explored in 1905 and was in production by 1907, shipping silver, gold, copper, and lead. The ore also carried traces of molybdenum and thorium, but neither was ever recovered. The first recorded shipment came in 1908: 45 ounces of silver and 455 pounds of copper from two tons of ore. The mine ran intermittently through 1919.
The mine's second life came with World War I. Demand for tungsten as a steel-hardening alloy soared at the start of the war, and prospectors across the East Mojave reopened any old working with tungsten in it. The Garvanza, the Sagamore, and the Mojave Annex nearby all shipped a few tons of high-grade tungsten ore during the war years. A small mill on the property handled the Carbonate Group's ores. The Park Service's inventory of the site lists a well, foundation, cairn, millsite, flume, shaft, two adits, and three cabins.
The mountain here is Teutonia Quartz Monzonite, a granite cut by shear zones that hold narrow quartz veins. The ore was in those veins: copper, lead, zinc, and tungsten in one package. The widest vein was only about ten inches across, which is why the workings stayed small. The main ore body is explored by two adits, the longer roughly 260 feet, the shorter about 240. The lower adit contains a fifty-foot winze and, at the 85-foot level, is intersected by a shaft at least 110 feet deep that comes down from the portal of the upper adit. By 1919 the recorded production had stopped. Ruins are all that is left.
