I ran across this article about the NASA moon missions
Moon Rock Mineralogy It mentions astronauts training in Ely.
… In preparation for their landing in the Hadley-Apennine region, the instructors along with Scott and Irwin, visited volcanic sites like Hawaii and areas “where they would see the kinds of rocks we expected to find as part of that primitive crust,” Lofgren noted.
These sites included the San Gabriel Mountains, Ely, Minnesota, the Rio Grande Gorge and the San Juan Mountains. Their training paid off in spades. Leon T. Silver, an Apollo 15 instructor from Cal Tech, called the mission the “apotheosis of all the things we’d been planning to do… it was the coming together of developing the technical capabilities, preparing men to be explorers as well as many, many other things.”...