The red neon sign above Mona’s bordello continues to light up the night sky and you can still get a steak the size of a picnic table at the downtown Star Hotel.
But due to the explosive growth of the gold mining industry in northeastern Nevada and resulting increase in casinos and hotels, Elko is a much bigger town than the one I recall when I last paid a visit to these parts in the fall of 1987.
At that time I was a guest of Euro-Nevada Mining, a Toronto-based company that was promoting a newly acquired royalty interest in the Goldstrike mine, the open pit operation that propelled its Canadian owner
Barrick Gold Corp. (
TSX: T.ABX,
Stock Forum) to global domination and made former Euro Chairman Seymour Schulich and President Pierre Lassonde fabulously wealthy.
To alert investors to the Goldstrike royalty interest, they had invited a group of mining executives and analysts to Reno and later flew them to Elko for a site visit.
Always full of mischief, Schulich and Lassonde would entertain themselves by dressing up as policemen before showing up at the Mustang Ranch (a Reno area bordello) in a bid to scare the visiting mining analysts who had travelled down from Canada. On another occasion, the assembled analysts made an unexpected appearance on national TV when celebrity host Geraldo Rivera showed up at the Mustang Ranch with a camera crew in tow.
This time around, I am here at the invitation of
NuLegacy Gold Corp. (
TSX: V.NUG,
Stock Forum), a Vancouver-based company that was taking investors to visit a gold exploration property, located roughly 100 kilometres southwest of Elko.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon the scenery is spectacular. With the backdrop of sagebrush, cattle ranches and rolling mountains, it is a region that could easily have been a staging ground for one of movie director John Ford’s epic westerns.
Indeed the road to NuLegacy’s property runs parallel to the Trans Continental Railroad and follows the same route that was taken by 19
th century pioneers, who were making their way to farmland in northern California.
In more recent years, the area has been made famous by huge gold discoveries, which continue to attract NuLegacy and other juniors into the region in search of the next big gold find.
Along the road to Nu Legacy’s Iceberg property, we will make a pit stop at another gold project that is being explored by
Gold Standard Ventures Corp. (
TSX: V.GSV,
Stock Forum), a Vancouver junior which recently attracted a $16.2 million cash investment from TSX and Australia Stock Exchange-listed
OceanaGold Corp. (
TSX: T.OGC,
Stock Forum).
Executives at both companies are hoping to discover enough gold on their properties to gain the attention of Barrick Gold,
Newmont Mining (
NYSE:NEM,
Stock Forum), or any other mining giant that might want to gain a foothold on this rich gold mining belt.
“The thing that we have going for us is location,’’ explained NuLegacy Chief Operating Officer Roger Steininger as we drive south along the highway in his Ford F-150 pickup truck.
He was referring to the fact that NuLegacy’s flagship Iceberg project is immediately adjacent to Barrick Gold’s huge Goldrush gold discovery, which is also located on the Cortez Gold trend, an alignment of deposits that ranks among the world’s most productive gold mining belts.
Cortez runs almost directly parallel to another alignment of gold deposits, known as the Carlin Trend. Its lineup of notable discoveries includes The Carlin mine, (which was found by the late geologist John Livermore and went into production in 1965), as well as Barrick’s flagship Goldstrike mine.
One of the largest and highest grade gold discoveries to have been found anywhere on the planet in recent years, Goldrush is estimated to host 15.5 million ounces of indicated and inferred gold resources, according to Barrick estimates.
A spry 74-year-old geologist, Steininger earned kudos in the mineral exploration business by playing a leading role in another large discovery, the Pipeline gold mine, which is located on the north end of Cortez trend.
He made the find in 1989 while consulting to
Royal Gold Inc. (
NASDAQ: RGLD,
Stock Forum), a precious metals royalty company that was trading this week at $67.19 on the TSX and has interests in 38 producing mines.
Pipeline is now part of Barrick’s Cortez operations, (100 kilometres southwest of Elko on the north end of the Cortez Trend) which cover 2,800 square kilometres and are expected to produce up to 900,000 ounces of gold this year at an all-in sustaining cost of $760-$835 an ounce.
The challenge for companies like Nu Legacy and Gold Standard is the prevailing view among geologists that most of the easy gold has been found in this area. As a result, exploration companies are having to drill deeper and spend more money to find payable ore.
Local prospectors must also grapple with complex geology and the peculiar nature of the Carlin-type gold mineralization. Gold particles in this part of the world are usually so small that they tend to be invisible to the naked eye. So when geologists are trying to spot the gold in rock samples, they generally have to do it with the help of an electron microscope.
“It means you have to put your geological thinking cap on,’’ Steininger says.
Low cost heap leaching
Still, geologists tend to be optimistic by nature and Steininger is no exception.
His optimism is based in part on the fact that most of the gold that NuLegacy and Gold Standard have discovered so far is of the oxidized variety, material that will presumably be cheap to mine.
It is the type of material that is usually amenable to the low cost heap leach extraction methods that have traditionally been used by mining companies in the region.
Typical examples are Newmont’s Rain and Emigrant gold mines, which we pass on the route to the NuLegacy and Gold Standard properties.
When we finally arrive at Gold Standard’s Railway Pinion claims, we are joined by NuLegacy CEO James Anderson and Gold Standard geologists Mac Roy Jackson and John Norby.
Also making the trip is Tom Graves, a Steamboat, Colorado-based engineer who sports a cowboy hat and once worked as a materials manager at the Kubaka mine in northeast Russia. “I’m an anti-government hillbilly and cynic,’’ he said.
Graves is accompanied by Jerome Pyfrom, a retired lawyer and resident of Nassau, Bahamas.
“I’m here to get a 101 course on what mining is all about, as part of my extended interest in gold,’’ says Pyfrom.
Railroad Pinion is actually located at the south end of the Carlin Trend, about three kilometres from Newmont Mining’s Rain and Emigrant operations.
Jackson tells the travelling party that they are visiting the last significantly unexplored district on the Carlin Trend.
During the visit, we are told that Gold Standard has outlined an indicated and inferred resource of 1.4 million ounces on the Pinion claims and another 375,000 ounces of inferred resources on the nearby Dark Star property, about four kilometres to the east.
Jackson said Gold Standard is continually talking to majors. But he said management could choose to put the project into production on its own, potentially at a cost of around $80 to $100 million.
“The two oxide deposits will hopefully be processed in a central facility,’’ Jackson said, adding that the processing facility could be located on vacant land between the Pinion and Dark Star claims.
Meanwhile, the junior’s ability to fund exploration in Nevada has been enhanced by a $16.2 million investment from
OceanaGold as well as contributions in the form of private placement money from Toronto-based billionaire Albert Friedberg, who has rights to up to 19.9% of the company.
In the next few weeks, the company plans to begin drilling the higher grade North Bullion deposit, which is located on the northern part of the Pinion claims and coughed up a 124-metre intersection, running 4.05 grams in 2012.
NuLegacy site visit
Roughly 50 kilometres to the southwest, NuLegacy has been working to exercise an option agreement with Barrick Gold that allows the Vancouver junior to earn a 70% stake in the Iceberg project.
Once the Vancouver junior has fulfilled its obligations, it will then be up to Barrick to decide whether or not to remain a joint venture partner in the project with a 30% interest or spend $15 million to back in for a 70% working interest.
If it exercises that option, NuLegacy would then be carried to production with the remaining 30% of the project.
As mining claims in this area are covered by a thick layer of sage brush, drill hole locations have been marked out by orange flags to give visitors a better sense of where the company has been focusing its exploration efforts.
Wooden tables resembling lecterns have been set up to allow Steininger and CEO James Anderson to put maps and drill core where they can easily be seen.
It was due to Steininger’s local connections, that NuLegacy was able to secure rights to the Iceberg claims, the company’s Chairman Albert Matter told me recently.
After learning that they had become available in late 2009, Matter moved quickly and the option deal was announced in September, 2010.
Drilling so far has outlined an exploration target of up to 110 million tonnes, grading 0.90 and 1.10 grams of gold. Over the next few weeks, the company plans to drill another 8 to 10 holes, putting it in a position to exercise the Barrick earn-in option.
As all of the important mineralization encountered at Iceberg is located within 150 metres of surface, company officials are optimistic that the property will prove amenable to open pit, heap leach mining methods, much like the other big operations which are located further north on the Cortez Trend.
For its part, Barrick Gold has said it expects to complete a feasibility study at Goldrush by the end of 2015.
The gold mining giant is working to secure permits that will allow it to sink twin underground declines (tunnels) that will allow it to better explore the northern limits of the known deposit.
However, the gold at Goldrush is much higher grade than Iceberg and will likely require expensive roasting methods to process the gold.
This has prompted NuLegacy officials to speculate that Barrick might see Iceberg as a cheaper development option. As drilling at Iceberg has mostly been focused at shallow depths, it leaves open the possibility that there could be richer ore at depth.
Adding to the intrigue is that fact that Barrick Gold has been selling assets in a bid to reduce a massive debt load.
Meanwhile, NuLegacy officials are waiting anxiously to see what Barrick officials decide to do once the latest Iceberg drilling program is complete. “We will see what the decision process is in 90 days,’’ Steininger says.
To complete the trip we take a drive back north to take a look at Barrick’s Cortez Hill gold operations to get a better sense of what might happen if either of the Gold Standard and NuLegacy properties are ever developed.
Northeastern Nevada is the region that pioneered the method of open pit mining with cyanide heap leach recovery that is today used at low-grade gold mines worldwide.
Because the gold particles in the rock tend to be so miniscule, mining companies need to remove huge amounts of earth to get enough gold to make their operations economic.
After the rock is blasted out of the ground, it is hauled in giant trucks and dumped on top a carefully designed liner made from black plastic that prevents the leaching solution (cyanide) from entering into the ground beneath.
A long network of hoses drips a weak solution of cyanide onto the ore pile. The gold in the ore is then dissolved in the cyanide solution and trickles down to the bottom of the pad where it flows to a man-made reservoir and is then pumped through a series of tanks containing carbon particles.
The dissolved gold sticks to the carbon particles, which are later separated from the gold in a stripping process. The resulting gold solution moves on to another process stage.
Fortunately, the wide open spaces in this area are big enough to accommodate these large scale operations, and as most of the mines in the region are of the open pit, heap leach variety, the dominant visual feature is the ore piles that are roughly the size of small mountains.
We stop briefly to take pictures of the Cortez operations and then drive further north to take a look at the enormous leach pads at the Pipeline mine, which Steininger helped to discover back in 1989.
From there it was back to Elko and steak dinner at the bustling Star Hotel.
Four days after we returned to Vancouver, NuLegacy released a fourth set of drill results from the Central Zone and North Zone areas of the Iceberg property, a move that sent the stock up 16% to 14.5 cents on August 27, 2015. The results included a “step out hole,” located 350 metres west of the Iceberg project, which returned a 7.6-metre intersection, which ran 0.27 grams gold per tonne.
Highlights from the latest batch of results include Hole 60, which coughed up a 25 ft. (7.62 metre) drill intersection averaging 3.60 grams gold per tonne.
“While grades were lower than the results released early this year, they continue to confirm our view that the Iceberg deposit is likely to be of sufficient size to attract Barrick Gold’s interest once the earn-in is complete,’’ wrote Derek Macpherson, a research analyst with Toronto-based M Partners in a report.
However, M Partners notes in its disclosure statements that its report does not constitute a recommendation to buy the stock. Commentary is for information purposes only, M Partners said.
Drilling is set to resume at the Iceberg property during the week of (Aug. 31 to Sept. 4 2015) , NuLegacy has said.