In 1980 I was working as an exploration geologist for AMEX Exploration, out of Tucson, Arizona. We were sampling old mining dumps, looking for molybdenum. One of the many mining camps and ghost towns that we visited was Grantsville. We spent quite a bit of time working in this area (our base camps were in Gabbs and Hawthorne). During breaks and before and after work, we explored the remains of this old mining town. It's an interesting area, and I wish we could have had more time to poke around the ruins.

One of my coworkers found an interesting spherical object, about the size of a golf ball. It seemed to be made of stone, but of no mineral that were could identify. It seemed very heavy for its size.

We sampled this area, especially the Grantsville Ridge, to the south and west of the old town. Of course we didn't find much molybdenum, but we did find significant gold values. With the price of gold at that time hovering around $800 per ounce our company decided that we should stake a claim to the area. So we located a good number of claims over the ridge, and eventually brought in a drilling rig to take deeper samples. The claim eventually didn't pan out, and the drill roads and drill sites were reclaimed and reseeded.

I cover our adventures in this area in my unpublished novel, Mobile Zoo Ghetto, book two in my Hardrock Trilogy. If you are interested, let me know, and I can arrange to let you read the manuscript.