SALTDALE, Calif. — In the Mojave Desert, where the temperatures were dancing around 100 degrees Monday, a white pickup rolled up slowly to a barbed-wire fence with a padlocked gate.
A worker for explosive chemical-maker Dyno Nobel gingerly climbed out of his truck and unlocked the 6-foot-high fence, pushed the gate wide open and slowly slipped back in the front cab where a co-worker rode shotgun.
They pulled into the rail yard next to 10 hopper railcars sitting in the middle of the Mojave’s dead mining town of Saltdale.
There’s nothing left of historic significance here, except maybe an old, crumbling concrete loading dock near the rail tracks. A few rotted rail ties are poking out of the dusty sand.
The U.S. Post Office has long since blown away and been pounded back into the burning hot sand of the Mojave. The school’s gone. So is the church. There’s no evidence of housing of any sort.
The only signs of life in this desolate town off a gravel road at the intersection of Saltdale and Red Rock Randsberg roads were the two Cheyenne-based Dyno Nobel workers who were sitting parked next to the rail spur with the air conditioning blasting in their truck, seats tilted back in a reclining position.
The Experts Are Surprised
Geologists Larry Vredenburgh and Gregg Wilkerson, formerly with field offices with the Bureau of Land Management in Southern California and expert historians on the mining history in the desertscape that runs from the Mexican border to the Mojave, stood aghast.
“Dyno Nobel?” said the retired Vredenburgh. “I thought they were still extracting salt from the area.”
Wilkerson, Vredenburgh's retired co-worker who these days is sporting a white Fu Manchu mustache, wasn’t sure what to think.
The geologists have written extensively on salt mining in the Saltdale area, as well as gold, silver, borax, tungsten and other minerals pulled out of the searing hot climate.
They’ve compiled essay after essay on the topic, and on a ride around the Mojave on Monday with Cowboy State Daily, they pointed to “headframes” (mine entrances) buried in the hills above gold mining town Randsburg, California. Also one in Soledad Mountain, a gold and silver project being developed in the town of Mojave that has seen its top blown off from open pit mining.
Mojave is where maverick aerospace engineer Burt Rutan has quietly toiled for decades on a novel lightweight spaceship at the Mojave Air & Space Port, where today dozens of commercial jets are parked for secret drone work.
Vredenburgh entered service with the BLM when he bid on a contract to help the public lands management agency write about the history of mining in the Mojave. Documentation on the mining in the area was limited.
Wilkerson found his way to the BLM by way of mining work on everything from uranium to copper, from Wyoming to Chile.
A few of the hopper trains seen Monday that hold ammonium nitrate. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
While House Saloon in Randsberg, California, a gold mining town. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
On left, Gregg Wilkerson and Larry Vredenberg, geologists who are retired from the Bureau of Land Management, look out over the Mojave Desert where Dyno Nobel stores hopper cars filled with ammonium nitrate. Wilkerson was trying to see a spot where trees were growing many miles in the distance but was blinded by the very bright sun. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
A weigh scale for trucks holding ammonium nitrate that is brought to local mines for blasting rock and dirt. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
On left, Gregg Wilkerson and Larry Vredenburgh, geologists who have retired from the Bureau of Land Management, have written extensively on Saltdale and mining operations in the reigon. They were surprised to find out Dyno Nobel was storing ammonium nitrate in hopper cars in the Mojave Desert instead of a salt mining extraction operation that may have restarted. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
Hopper cars holding ammonium nitrate in Saltdale, California, in the Mojave Desert, where temperatures hit 100 on Monday. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
A Dyno Nobel worker at the Saltdale, California, railyard, requesting that Cowboy State Daily not go near the unloading dock for ammonium nitrate. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) 
The entrance to the Dyno Nobel rail yard in Saltdale, California, where it keeps its workers watch over the explosive chemical ammonium nitrate for use in local gold and borax mining operations. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily)
Mum On Saltdale
Saltdale has become a topic of interest with Dyno Nobel because a railcar carrying 30 tons of ammonium nitrate, a chemical used in explosives in Wyoming coal mines, left Cheyenne’s Dyno Nobel factory on the western edge of the city April 12, 2023.
Then somewhere between Cheyenne and its destination in Saltdale, it reportedly disappeared.
Dyno Nobel won’t say anything about Saltdale.
But it’s apparent something is going on there. Cowboy State Daily, Vredenburgh and Wilkerson on Monday observed hoppers filled with ammonium nitrate at the rail spur.
A label on the side of each of the hopper cars had the hazardous material placard of “UN 2067,” the identifier for ammonium nitrate. The railcars sitting in Saltdale on Monday indicated that their hulls could hold 5,191 cubic feet, or up to three times the 30 tons missing from the Cheyenne shipment last year.
When a Union Pacific train carrying the load of fertilizer more than 1,000 miles arrived in Saltdale, California, 13 days later, the fertilizer had vanished.
Still Missing
The loss of the fertilizer is concerning to federal law enforcement authorities.
At mines such as those in Wyoming’s energy-rich Powder River Basin and other industrial sites, the ammonium nitrate is mixed with other chemicals, such as diesel fuel, and then blasting caps are used to make it explode.
Ammonium nitrate is primarily used as a fertilizer, but it also was a key chemical used in the bomb that terrorist Timothy McVeigh built to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
But there’s nothing growing in the Mojave that’s green.
Sagebrush and dying yucca trees dot the landscape, and black-tailed jackrabbits occasionally dart out onto black asphalt roads.
In late March, the Federal Railroad Administration told Cowboy State Daily that the agency was still investigating what happened to the hopper car filled with ammonium nitrate.
“The FRA investigation is still being finalized,” a spokesman with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s FRA said in an emailed statement in March. The spokesman also wrote that the findings in the report are “pending potential enforcement actions.”
“FRA’s investigation is focused on both the railroad and the shipper,” the agency said. “Enforcement action would be taken against any party which violated rail safety regulations.”
On Monday, Cowboy State Daily was awaiting an updated response from the FRA following a query submitted a week ago requesting information on the final report.
FRA previously said that the incident investigation was classified as a “non-accident release” and determined that a faulty bottom outlet on a covered hopper car caused the “unintentional release” of ammonium nitrate fertilizer pellets, also known as prills.
Surprise, Surprise
“Both of us have written papers about the old town of Saltdale, where they used to extract salt from the dry lake there, and crushed the salt and ship it out,” said Vredenburgh of his co-author and colleague Wilkerson.
“I was looking at Google maps about a year ago and noticed a new siting (rail spur) at Saltdale with hopper cars and assumed they were extracting salt again,” he said. “It turns out, as we found out today, that the hopper cars were filled with ammonium nitrate, and that there is a facility located next to the hopper cars to remove the material by emptying it into a truck.”
Located just outside the fenced-in railyard where the hopper cars were parked was a weigh scale for trucks that haul the ammonium nitrate to nearby mines.
Any of these mines could be using the ammonium nitrate for blasting rock and dirt, Vredenburg said. They cited nearby gold, borax and other mining operations.
“That’s what we observed,” Vredenburgh said.
“I was surprised to see that Dyno Nobel was there,” he added matter-of-factly. “I thought they were extracting salt again. And to go out there and see that it had nothing to do with salt anymore. It was just a transfer station.”
Don’t Buy The Leak Theory
Neither Vredenburgh nor Wilkerson readily embraced an explanation from Dyno Nobel, Union Pacific and others that ammonium nitrate had leaked out of the hopper cars.
“It seems unlikely to me,” Vredenburgh said.
“I can’t see them losing a lot out of the bottom of the cars,” Wilkerson said.
“I live in Tehachapi, California, about 40 miles from here (in Saltdale), and we’ve got all these big grain trains that run through there all time, and grain leaks out at the bottom of those cars, and you can see it on the ground. The birds love it,” Vredenburgh said. “Things do leak out of hopper grounds. But it’s hard to say.”
Both say they find Dyno Nobel’s accounting of the missing ammonium nitrate suspicious.
“You don’t lose that much,” said Wilkerson. “That’s a lot of ammonium nitrate. It’s a sensitive material. You’d want to keep track of it. Somebody wasn’t paying attention to something.”
Contact Pat Maio at pat@cowboystatedaiiy.com
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
