GOLD in them thar Hills! Golden Queen MOJAVE – A very special guest stopped by last Thursday’s Mojave Chamber of Commerce regular meeting at the Mariah Inn. That was none other than Robet Wallisch, chief operating officer of Golden Queen Mining Co. Ltd. He brought the Chamber up to speed on Golden Queen’s operations now that they are back in action at the historic mine just south of Mojave.
He told of the state of operations at that mine that last year alone pulled 50,000 ounces of gold out of that mine in 2017. The company posted $62 million in profits last year.
Golden Queen employs 215 people currently and they are always looking for more, said Mr. Wallisch. He stated that they are seeking at least 8 more employees for ‘good paying’ positions at the mine that he said “you can raise a family on.” He stated that they are experiencing turnover due to employee absenteeism and other factors that make retention an issue. They seek to employ up to 225-230 employees in total over time, and their operations have no end in sight.
The mining company seeks to achieve a steady 65,000 to 70,000 ounces a year to get back in black, so to speak, increasing production by $19 million last year. The mine has moved their operations from the west side of Soledad Mountain to the east side where, Wallisch explained, the content of gold is higher. On that side the gold is more centrally distributed making for less excess material to sift through.
Wallisch explained that there are nine major veins on Soledad Mountain with 23 more cracks with possible deposits also. They are mining three of the nine currently. The means they employ is to “shoot it” or blast away layers of sediment to expose deposits found in sample core collections and compute model predictions based on those core samples. They lay the ground open in 20 foot slices called “benches” that produce the “tiered” look seen from the highway. Wallisch stated, “We know where the gold and silver is.”
Heat Leeching is employed to extract the precious metals over a long process involving a three-tier crushing system that takes raw material and ends up with crushed material down to 1 1/2 inches. Sodium cyanide is used with plastic layered matting to seep down through the material using zinc to bond with it separating it for extraction over time. The process is called Merrill-Crow and has been employed since the 1930s for extracting gold from rock and sediment.
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