Finding Mines and minerals

There is a tool made by a fellow know as Whitethaiger called OziUL.  Its a wonderful tool to use if you like to go find old mines and look for minerals.  Essentially it takes the US mine database information and presents it as points in OziExplorer along with a lot of pertinent information.

Here is a screenshot of the tool in use with OziExplorer in Colorado:

At this point, you need to either purchase a DVD set from Uwe (Mr. Whitethaiger himself) or email him at <contact at whitethaiger dot net> (according to his website).

With some help from Uwe, I have been able to extract some of the other areas from the mines database and create additional mrds data files that OziUL can read.  Here is a screenshot of the border between Nevada and California displaying the mines data:

Currently, I have assembled the following:

1. Colorado [24FEB08]
2. New Mexico [24FEB08]
3. Utah [24FEB08]
4. One file [24FEB08] for the entire Southwest (including some of California) [68,499 mine points]

The entire US mines DB is a bit too large to work with all at once (at least on my laptop) so I haven’t tried creating a single large file.  What I did to generate the .csv file was simply go to this URL, and get the data for a particular geographic region.  Then I processed the resulting file to remove a LOT of embedded null lines and combined the files for the SW states into a single file.  Import this file into OziUL, and then export to an Ozi point file .pnt.

Here is a snapshot of the mineral information currently in the database [30NOV08], to make it easy to see if anything has changed over time:

Newly updated mines info:

1. Four Corners + Nevada [30NOV08]
2. Southwest [30NOV08] (Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah) [71,016 mine points]
3. Texas, Idaho and Wyoming [30NOV08]

Related posts:

1. New Maps added!!