Pink Knolls Mining District, Iron County, Utah, USAi

Regional Level Types
Pink Knolls Mining District	Mining District
Iron County	County
Utah	State
USA	Country

Pink Knolls district lies in the southern Wah Wah Mountains on the Beaver–Iron County line. The area has had only a tiny amount of U production from the Desert View mine, probably in the late 1940s, and little other recorded development. Much of the more recent activity has focused on the Cina Hg-S mine area. Several unpublished reports suggest the Cina mine was thoroughly investigated as a Hg prospect in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including drilling, trenching, underground development, calculation of mineral resources, metallurgical studies, economic evaluations, market analysis, and possibly some pilot-scale test mining.
The Pink Knolls district lies astride the east-trending, Miocene-age, Blue Ribbon lineament of Rowley and others (1978) in the eastern Basin and Range Province. The Cina mine (Iron County) hosts cinnabar and native sulfur along a northeast-trending, moderately west-dipping, normal fault between strongly altered Miocene Blawn Formation rhyolitic tuffs in the northwest hanging wall and unaltered Middle Cambrian Trippe Limestone in the footwall (Steven and Morris, 1987). Mineralization can be traced along the fault zone for over a mile but is most intense in areas where east-trending cross-faults intersect the main fault zone. The main fault is filled with 1- to 10-ft-wide zones (average ~2.5 ft) of opal and chalcedony and paleo-hot spring fumaroles occur along the zone sporadically (USGS Model 27a). Red cinnabar occurs as thin seams in the chalcedony along with black metacinnabar, sulfur, and white, coarse-grained gypsum. Cinnabar is primarily concentrated in the vein/fault itself under the siliceous sinter capping. The cinnabar occurs as disseminated specks, intergranular fillings, and veinlets. Sulfur occurs as lenses/pods in porous zones in the gypsum-bearing altered tuff hanging wall.
Some mineral exploration in the 1970s (SX East) focused on the broad areas of advanced argillic alteration in Blawn Formation tuffs as a source of alunite. Most of the subsequent mineral exploration in the 1980s and later focused on the potential for Au at depth under the Hg-S paleo-fumaroles. The Seeps low-sulfidation, epithermal quartz veins (USGS Model 25c) were also drilled for Au in the 1980s.