Preliminary report on the geology of the Sedalia Mine area and its Proterozoic deposits of base-metal sulfides and gahnite, Chaffee County, Colorado

TL;DRAbstract

The Sedalia mine, about 4 mi north-northwest of Salida, Chaffee County, Colorado, is developed in a Proterozoic zinc-copper sulfide deposit. Located in 1881, the mine produced about 90,000 tons of ore, largely from the oxidized upper part of the deposit, before closing in 1918 due to a decline in the price of copper. One of numerous Proterozoic sulfide deposits clustered in the Salida area, the Sedalia deposit is stratabound in a terrane of metasedimentary and metavolcanic rocks that trend northeast and dip steeply southeast. The Sedalia deposit occurs in a lithologic unit composed of interlayered garnet-cordierite-amphibole gneiss, garnetiferous quartz-mica schist, and other rocks that contain abundant cordierite and gahnite. This garnetiferous unit at the mine comprises the core of a major drag fold that apparently plunges'northeastward at a shallow to moderate angle parallel to the plunge of lineations and the axes of minor folds. The orebody is inferred to be elongate and to plunge

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