Article mentioning U.S. SilverHere's an excerpt from an article by David Bond (www.silverminers.com).
I wonder if something may be in the works, even preliminarily, regarding a merger of USA, SNS, and Sterling, despite the following statement by USA in their latest PR: "It has been recently reported in the local North Idaho pressthat an ownership consolidation of various silver propertiesin the Silver Valley of northern Idaho may be occurring.It was further reported that the Company's Galena, Coeurand Caladay properties are included in the reported consolidation.These reports are not correct and the Company is not partof any consolidation effort."
Anybody have any opinions as to whether this would be beneficial to the USA shareholders? I don't know much about SNS, but I read up on Sterling Mining a few years ago and from what I remember, they had some pretty serious silver reserves.
| |
| A Double-Homer for the Silver Valley |
(excerpt):
Within the past week our friends at SNS Silvereffectively tied up governance of the Silver Belt between the Crescentand the Consolidated Silver, and brought John Ryan, who set up the dealfor U.S. Silver to buy the Galena-Coeur-Caladay mining complex fromCoeur d'Alene Mines back in 2006, into the CEO's chair at Sterling,filling the vacuum left by Ray DeMotte's departure last May.
AWallace native, Ryan will restore a needed sense of vision to thatcompany (we could dis him for his Boston College law degree, but atleast he learned to be a mining engineer here at the University ofIdaho), and he will be joined by some pretty competent help: DavidGreenway, who put together the SNS acquisition of the Crescent; AndyGrundman, Sunshine Precious Metals Inc.'s personable lawyer; and RonHo, the CFO at SNS Silver, as Sterling's corporate secretary andtreasurer.
Marketing theSilver Belt's west end, with its half-dozen miles of tetrahedrite onthe south side of the Osburn Fault, will be a no-brainer. Sterling'sinfrastructure is in superb shape and comprises the Jewell and SilverSummit shafts, and the newly driven Sterling Tunnel at the SunshineMine, along with one restored mill at the Sunshine and one operationalmill at the Silver Summit. SNS drilled out a respectable block ofsilver and base-metal ore at the Crescent above the Hooper whosemetallurgy is compatible with the Sunshine concentrator.
Notyet into the mix would be U.S. Silver's huge land package, comprisingfour deep shafts, two mills, two tailings ponds and some of the bestknown reserves of primary silver in the western hemisphere. For thetime being U.S. Silver wants to forge its own way, but the marketingand operational synergies of nearly a dozen miles of the Silver Beltare obvious to everybody but them.
Meantime,Justin Rice's long-held claims up Two Mile Canyon north of the OsburnFault are coming in. Big time. There's more ore up on Royal ApexVentures Inc.'s land than 50/50 joint-venturer Azteca Gold dares toannounce in one blast. Suffice it to say that some one-half of Azteca'sshares are held by insiders; CEO Matt Russell gobbled up some millionunits the company's private placement earlier this month, increasinghis fully-diluted position in the company to more than 31 percent.Russell comes from a long tradition of miners betting their hunches andcoming out winners. He and his father, Bob, co-founded General Moly,which resulted in scads of happy shareholders and mining guys, andneither Russell is a stranger to the rocks of the Coeur d'Alene MiningDistrict.
Our friendDavid Morgan, who visited the Royal Apex property Azteca is drilling(it's due north of Osburn, Idaho, midpoint between the Sunshine and theCaladay but on the north and vastly unexplored side of the OsburnFault) last week, penciled out just the base-metal values and they cameat a bit under $600 per ton at current prices and that doesn't countthe silver. The hoop-la doesn't stop there; the zinc grades are so richyou can take the rock out with tweezers and drop it right into therefinery – no need to separate the stuff from its host minerals.Old-timers tell us there were rich bands of zinc like this located inthe Pine Creek District west of Bunker Hill before and during World WarII. So this isn't company hype.
TheRoyal Apex Ventures/AZG story is worth telling. Justin Rice and Mattand Bob Russell speak the same language. As CEO of Coeur d'Alene Mines,Justin Rice put together the Coeur Shaft sinking deal back in the1970s. Flush with cash, he then finagled the nascent Rochester Mineaway from Asarco and vended it into then-publicly-traded Royal Apex,which Coeur immediately acquired. Rochester turned out to be a worldclass gold and silver deposit and has served up, since its 1986opening, some 110 million ounces of silver and 1 million ounces ofgold. There is a reason folks here in the Silver Valley call JustinRice a “mine finder.”
“It wasalways our intent to come back to the Silver Valley and sink shaft onthe Royal Apex property as soon as Rochester was operational, based onour exploration results,” Rice recalls. “But events changed and I wasno longer in charge of the company.” Rice left Coeur d'Alene Mines andthe surviving company went off to Mexico and Bolivia in search ofsilver, eschewing its holdings in the Silver Valley. Coeur, once adarling of the NYSE, is now essentially a penny stock. It did not takeRice long to re-locate CDE's old Royal Apex claims and return to theplans he'd laid out in the late 1980s. Last year, Azteca and theRussells raised money for a couple of drill rigs and went to work onRice's land. You will be hearing about assay results for months.
Since1884 the Coeur d'Alene District has been the premier host of primarysilver mining in the United States, surpassing the Comstock Lode'slegendary production and Potosi's recorded production. Preliminaryresults from drilling by Azteca suggest silver might not even be ourprimary metal, at least not at depth. What happens here in the SilverValley in the next few months will be of a scale not seen since thediscovery of the Bunker Hill, the Hercules, the Hecla or the Sunshine.Perhaps bigger on orders of magnitude. This is not something to bemissed. It's exciting here again. All of which proposes even largersynergies, as the new North meets the old South, and bright guys are incharge again.