Point Reyes Light - December 13, 2001

Bizarre tale of tungsten mine

By Gregory Foley

A secretive miner who never registered his business may have left a contaminated mine on the shores of Tomales Bay.

Dick McManus, of Inverness, was a long-time friend of the mine’s former owner Dell Bender.

McManus said Bender had access to a wide variety of mining equipment in Virginia City, Nevada, and started extracting soil from his well-protected, forested parcel a half-century ago. Bender pulled tons of dirt from a hillside beside Redwood Creek, fed it through a hopper into a truck, and drove it across his property to a mill, where he dumped it to be crushed and separated.

The process yielded vast amounts of pure scheelite, which Bender kept in large old-fashioned coffee cans in one of his shacks, McManus said.

Canned tungsten

"His walls were lined with coffee cans that were so heavy you couldn’t pick one of them up with one hand," he said. "According to Dell, his mine was the richest tungsten deposit in the country at the time."

McManus, who often visited Bender at the site in the 1950s to camp and hunt deer, said Bender was very secretive about the mine, and did all of the work there himself. In addition to establishing the mine, Bender cleared an area beside the creek and tried to develop a campground where visitors could barbecue and set up picnics, but the idea never flourished, McManus told The Light.

However, Bender did once hire a man to bulldoze a section of his property further up North Dream Farm Road from his residence. The man was killed one day when the machine rolled over on top of him, and then Bender became paranoid that people had discovered the mine and were stealing his ore, McManus said.

"It drove him crazy. He was never right after that," McManus said.

Blasted it shut

Fearful that the potentially lucrative mine would be discovered, Bender eventually "dynamited it to hide it so no one would know where it is," McManus said. While McManus does not recall Bender ever selling any of his scheelite – which was worth some $250 per coffee can – he said that the material has long since disappeared. (Pure tungsten is valued at approximately $50 per pound today.)

On a visit to the site in August, McManus noted that while Bender’s old residence on present-day state parkland remains (albeit in shambles), two buildings with foundations that were used as his mill have completely disappeared. The mine itself has grown over, but the entrance is visible among old machine parts and mounds of tailings.

Point Reyes Light Cover | News | Coastal Traveler