Quest for Gold
CC2GO
Posts: 664
I found this interesting article online today. Here's a small portion of it:
EUREKA, Nev. -- The gold at the Ruby Hill Mine is microscopic, specks of specks that amount to a few ounces in every 100 tons of rock. It is embedded hundreds of feet beneath the floor of the high desert. In staggered, 10-hour shifts, a miner removes buckets of blasted rock 40 tons at a time, making 100 passes an hour with his diesel-powered loader. He and the other miners will have to dig round the clock for a year just to remove the 600-foot layer of clay covering the gold. "I've never seen a nugget myself. Maybe one of these days." Maybe not.
The visible gold in North America, for the most part, has already been found. What remains are almost literally molecules of gold, buried deep. Now priced at about $657 per troy ounce, even the high cost of extraction makes microns of gold worthwhile.
Expeditions in Russia, Africa and South America are underway in hope of uncovering the next great deposit. And in Nevada -- if the state were a country, it would be the third-largest gold-producing nation in the world -- small mines are being reopened or kept open.
Because of gold, sales tax revenue in Eureka County has early doubled. Housing is filled to capacity. Property values are at an all-time high. The high school is getting an addition. Barrick Gold Corp. will have spent about $75 million before a single ounce of gold is recovered from the new dig. The plant must be cleaned and refurbished. There will be a year of blasting, digging, hauling, dumping and grading before production begins.
">FULL STORY
EUREKA, Nev. -- The gold at the Ruby Hill Mine is microscopic, specks of specks that amount to a few ounces in every 100 tons of rock. It is embedded hundreds of feet beneath the floor of the high desert. In staggered, 10-hour shifts, a miner removes buckets of blasted rock 40 tons at a time, making 100 passes an hour with his diesel-powered loader. He and the other miners will have to dig round the clock for a year just to remove the 600-foot layer of clay covering the gold. "I've never seen a nugget myself. Maybe one of these days." Maybe not.
The visible gold in North America, for the most part, has already been found. What remains are almost literally molecules of gold, buried deep. Now priced at about $657 per troy ounce, even the high cost of extraction makes microns of gold worthwhile.
Expeditions in Russia, Africa and South America are underway in hope of uncovering the next great deposit. And in Nevada -- if the state were a country, it would be the third-largest gold-producing nation in the world -- small mines are being reopened or kept open.
Because of gold, sales tax revenue in Eureka County has early doubled. Housing is filled to capacity. Property values are at an all-time high. The high school is getting an addition. Barrick Gold Corp. will have spent about $75 million before a single ounce of gold is recovered from the new dig. The plant must be cleaned and refurbished. There will be a year of blasting, digging, hauling, dumping and grading before production begins.
">FULL STORY
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Comments
finding gold. be it with sluice, pan, metal detector etc...
i notice a lot of it takes place in alaska and regions near
CA. but they do have maps showing other places that have
seen color.
one could give it a go and make money. it would be hard
work and experience would be worth more then brute force.
sadly, i am not man enough to try it. i would probably shrivel
up underneath some thorn plant and die in the wilderness
of alaska.
Back to gold - my sister lives in Oakland, CA and she has friends who spend their weekends in the Sierra Nevadas essentially panning for gold (only with more sophisticated machinery). Apparently, the melting of the snow in the spring still washes enough down off the mountains to make "panning" the river bottoms worthwhile. I spoke to one of her friends five years ago - apparently, the gold they find is usually about the size of birdshot or a bit smaller.
Check out the Southern Gold Society