Bonanza Opal Mine

The digging ground at Bonanza lies just below the horn, the right-hand tip, of Gooch Table, above Virgin Valley in the northwest corner of Nevada. What visitors work is tailings: rock already brought out of the mine and spread across a large digging area. The mine’s experienced miners and hosts show newcomers what to look for and how to find it. Diggers bring their own tools or rent them on the spot. Travel Nevada advises carrying a spray bottle and a rake, because the opal is hard to see until the dirt is washed off. Children 12 and under dig free with a paying adult, and the operators advertise birthday parties at the dig. Those who would rather not dig are told they may relax instead.

The fee dig runs Friday through Sunday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend, with the holiday Mondays added. The 2026 season closed on Tuesday, September 8, until the 2027 season. Cash and checks are taken up at the dig. The Bonanza store down by the campground takes cards. It opens for an hour early on dig mornings and again for a short while after the dig closes. Shareholders in the company can dig beyond the public days if they take extra training, wear protective clothing and follow added rules. Some of the stones pictured on the company’s site came from their digging. The mine has appeared on the Travel Channel program “Cash & Treasures.”

The gravel road through Virgin Valley

By a 1951 Geological Survey count, the opal district lies 41 miles west of Denio, which sits on the Oregon line. The mine’s own directions start in Winnemucca. They run 33 miles north on Highway 95, then about 66 miles west on Highway 140 to Denio Junction. From there they continue about 24 miles farther west on 140, up a mile-long grade, to a cluster of signs for the opal mines. From Lakeview, Oregon, the way is about 83 miles east on Highway 140 into the Sheldon Wildlife Refuge, to a graded gravel road just past the highway rest area.

Two miles down that gravel road is the Virgin Valley Campground. It was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression and costs nothing to use. A natural warm spring feeds its swimming pool, bathhouse and showers. There are drinking water, picnic tables, pit toilets, and room for tents, trailers and RVs, without electrical hookups. From the campground the route forks right and runs 4.5 miles through the valley to a signed road. That road climbs past the Opal Queen Mine and through a gate, then bends left up to the dig.

The valley holds antelope, many kinds of birds and wildflowers, with waterfowl at their thickest in late spring. There is no hunting. People fish in the Dufurrena Ponds, at a pond set aside for children, and in the local reservoirs. Bog Hot Springs is nearby for soaking, and the top of Gooch Table is open for exploring. Travel Nevada puts Thousand Creek Gorge at 600 to 1,000 feet deep and says a car can be driven to its edge. The mine calls it a short hike from the campground. Stories, Travel Nevada says, tell of indigenous people living there for hundreds of years.

Opal in ash and wood

In November 1950, M. H. Staatz and H. L. Bauer Jr. of the U.S. Geological Survey spent four days in the valley for the Atomic Energy Commission. They were testing opal for uranium on nineteen claims held by Jack and Toni Crane of Oswego, Oregon. They found the valley cut into gently dipping beds of tuff and ash at least 300 feet thick. Basalt capped those beds on the east side, and terrace gravels capped them on the west. The gravels carried pebbles of volcanic rock and fragments of fossilized wood, opal and chert. Silica had soaked the ash in every degree. Some of it had become rock resembling silicified shale. Some had altered all the way to translucent, massive brown and pale-green opal. Other opal they found was gray, tan, black or white, banded or variegated. The only uranium mineral they found was carnotite, a powdery canary-yellow coating. The district, they wrote, “has produced some of the best gem opal found in the United States.” The Crane claims’ pale-green opal was then selling to collectors and cabochon cutters for 25 cents or more a pound.

The Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology names opal the state gemstone. It describes the mineral as generally amorphous silica, commonly laid down near the surface by thermal water. The bureau’s postcard specimen from the Virgin Valley district is opal that formed as petrified wood. Travel Nevada names Virgin Valley black fire opal in particular as the state gemstone.

The Opal Queen’s newspapers

Precious opal was first found in Virgin Valley in 1905, and Bonanza was worked that same year. Matheson and Dow located the Bonanza group of mines and filed location certificates on it in 1908.

In 1910 the San Francisco Chronicle sent Flora Lockheed to report on the opal discovery. The mine’s history says her two sons founded Lockheed aircraft. Gem and Mineral Magazine wrote that “She not only found the task to her liking, but filed mining claims and for years afterwards, she was regarded as the most celebrated opal miner of that region.” She persuaded Mrs. Hammond, a wealthy woman from Santa Barbara who owned the Rainbow Mine, to finance her mining and her management of the mine. Into her eighties she mined all over the valley. In each mine she worked she left old newspapers as a calling card. The present owners later found them in the tunnels she had dug. Australians called her the “Opal Queen,” and the name still holds. She died in 1948.

A bottle under the blade

In 1954 Glenn and Bea Hodson and Keith and Agnes Hodson bought Bonanza from Mrs. Lockheed’s grandson and Mark Foster.

One warm morning in 1973, Keith Hodson was scraping the surface of the mine with a bulldozer, getting ready for fee-digging customers due that day. The blade flipped up what he took for an empty beer bottle. He climbed down and found an opal weighing more than six pounds, filled with flashes of fire. It was officially named The Bonanza Opal.

The Hodsons obtained a patent for the mine in 1980 and sold it in 1988. Lloyd Olds and Dick Leger bought it that June. In July 1992 it became a corporation, and the mine passed to the holders of 100 shares of Bonanza Opal Mines, Inc.