Iron Peak Mining District, Iron County, Utah, USAi

Regional Level Types
Iron Peak Mining District	Mining District
Iron County	County
Utah	State
USA	Country

The Iron Peak mining district is located on the Markagunt Plateau about 26 mi northeast of Cedar City in northeastern Iron County. The district covers a few small Fe prospects; there has been no recorded production, but the area has been repeatedly staked and reexamined by prospectors. The Iron Peak Group prospect has the largest area of surface disturbance.
The Iron Peak district lies on the early Miocene Iron Axis mineral belt in the Markagunt Plateau of the transition zone from the Basin and Range Province on the west to the Colorado Plateau on the east. The Iron Peak district lies in the Iron Peak graben. The graben contains Miocene Brian Head volcaniclastic strata and Bear Valley ash-flow tuff intruded by the Iron Peak laccolith. The intrusive is a calc-alkaline, diorite-gabbro porphyry laccolith (20.2 Ma) with an exposed base at an elevation of about 7500 ft and an apex at 8158 ft on Iron Peak. The laccolith is the most mafic and easternmost intrusive on the Iron Axis. A series of feeder dikes to the laccolith are exposed in a canyon to the south and below the base of the intrusion. The Iron Peak diorite- gabbro porphyry is primarily composed of augite, plagioclase, and has 8% opaque minerals, mostly magnetite (Biek and others, 2015). Slope wash deposits around Iron Peak have abundant resistant magnetite fragments.
Iron Peak mineralization occurs as magnetite veins mostly less than an inch wide, but ranging up to 10 ft thick (Spurney, 1984). Bullock (1970) describes three small Fe prospects near Iron Peak: a shallow shaft southwest of the peak, a prospect near the peak, and the Iron Peak Group dozer scape north of the peak. He reports the ore is magnetite with minor hematite and gives the average of 14 samples collected in the district as 62.4% Fe, 4.9% SiO2, 0.36% Mn, 0.03% P, and 0.006% S. Minor specularite has also been reported.