Drone Panic Over Virginia City
Virginia City, being a place where the mountains have been examined, prospected, blasted, tunneled, drilled, staked, claimed, disputed, and otherwise meddled with for more than a century and a half, was naturally alarmed when somebody noticed a drone flying about the neighborhood on Saturday. There are few things more suspicious in an old mining town than a machine hovering in the sky, particularly when nobody has yet had the courtesy to explain what it wants.
The Storey County Sheriff’s Office investigated the matter, which is precisely what a sheriff’s office is supposed to do when a mysterious flying contraption appears over Virginia City. After looking into it, the deputies discovered that the drone was not spying on the citizenry, photographing their backyards, recording their breakfast habits, or preparing a federal dossier on who has the most questionable lawn ornaments.
It was doing something much more Nevada-like: looking for minerals. The drone belongs to a geophysical surveying operation working claims in the area, including Bureau of Land Management property surrounding Virginia City and the Virginia City Highlands.
Its payload, the sheriff’s office explained, is a metallurgical survey device, which is a respectable scientific way of saying that somebody is sending an expensive flying machine over the desert to see whether the ground is hiding something valuable. This is, of course, an ancient Nevada tradition.
The old prospectors carried picks, shovels, and canteens and wandered into the hills hoping to discover gold. The modern prospector carries sophisticated electronic equipment, launches a drone from the back of a pickup, and lets technology do the wandering.
Civilization has advanced wonderfully, although the object remains the same: find something beneath the dirt that can be exchanged for something above the dirt.
The sheriff’s office also made clear that the drone does not film or photograph. This was undoubtedly reassuring to the residents who had already imagined themselves appearing in some secret government archive under the heading, “Suspicious Man in Bathrobe Standing on Porch at 9:17 a.m.”
It is comforting to know that, at least for the moment, the drone is interested in rocks rather than people.
The survey flights are expected to continue through Monday, Aug. 17, or Tuesday, Aug. 18, around Geiger Mountain and State Route 341, the Virginia City Highlands and Gold Hill. That gives residents several days to become accustomed to the sight of a mechanical insect buzzing overhead and to practice the ancient Nevada art of looking suspiciously at anything they cannot identify.
The sheriff’s office has already advised the pilot about private-property boundaries and reviewed the planned flight paths. This is probably the best possible ending to a modern Nevada mystery: the sheriff knows where the drone is going, the pilot knows where he ought not go, the prospectors know what they are looking for, and the public knows that nobody is secretly photographing them.
Still, one ought not become too comfortable. Because in Virginia City, if history teaches us anything, it is that whenever somebody says, “We are just looking,” there is a very good chance that somebody has already brought a shovel.
