What to do if you find a Lode Gold Deposit

A view of an undeveloped lode gold deposit.  The gold is in the white veins in the photo.
Photo by Eric Jones

The first thing you have too do after finding a potential deposit of lode gold is to be sure that it legally is yours either by ownership of the land, by a legal claim or by working out a deal with the rightful owner of the land.  The best type of deal is when you are the owner of the land where the deposit has been found.  In some jurisdictions where it is permitted is the mineral claim whereby you come into ownership of the mineral rights by expending a certain amount of money on the claim per year for several years until it finally becomes a patented claim that in effects gives you the ownership of the claim.  If it is on private property that does not belong to you, and you can’t file a claim then you will have to work out some kind of agreement with the lawful landowner.

Most lode gold deposits are found in quartz veins that commonly called “Bull Quartz” by miners that are usually emplaced in a fault zone that might consist of one large vein or a whole series of quartz veins holding gold, or both.  It should be kept in mind that all showings of gold are not developed into gold mines in fact very few of them are.  During the 19^th century this situation was called “Gamblers Ruin” that was the title of a book about mine appraisal.  The chances of developing your find into a working mine are about 1 in 300.

Gold in Quartz
Photo by Rob Lavinsky

If there is gold present you can find it in a brook adjacent to the suspected deposit.  This is done by panning in the brook a few feet on either side of the deposit, and another sample from the brook right at the point where the deposit is, or as close as you can get.  Another way for detecting gold deposits is by using a metal detector some of them can be set specifically for gold.  In some places you can rent a metal detector.  There are times when the gold in quartz is visible to the naked eye or with a magnifying glass.

An important step in developing a find into a mine is finding out if it actually contains gold and other valuable minerals this is done by taking a representative sample across the exposure by chiseling a line right across the exposure using a hammer and chisel.  This is hard work, but is necessary to get some kind of idea about what you have.  The rock chips are all saved and submitted to a licensed assayer for analysis.  This determines if you have discovered anything worth further exploratory work by determining how much gold is present per ton.  Remember gold showing as little as a few grams per ton is a payable deposit under the present price for gold.  You have a bonanza deposit when you measure the amount of gold present in troy ounces of gold per ton.

Another view of lode gold.
Photo by Rob Lavinsky

Once you have established that there is indeed gold present it is time to call for a diamond drilling program because there is nothing more convincing to bankers and other members of the financial world that is more convincing them a set of core samples.  The truth is you are pretty much on the hook for the first core sample that is taken at the point of discovery.  Further cores are taken by offsetting from the original discovery site by a predetermined distance in initial investigations this is usually 50 meters in each direction around the point of initial discovery.  It is not unusual for a drilling program to consist of several thousand meters of core drilling.

Core drilling also determines whether or not a find can be developed into a commercially viable mine, and there are any number of reasons why it isn’t.  One of the big finds we made during the 1960s was a deposit of copper that was drilled proving a resource worth $100,000,000 at the time.  It was never developed into a mine because It would have required the expenditure of $1,000,000,000 to get the ore out of the find.  In other words it wasn’t commercially viable, so no mine was developed.  The area was just too remote, and it still is.  We wound up calling this find the $100,000,000 nuisance.

Oil Seep in Carlin Type Gold Deposits

As reported in the July 15, 1991 issue of the Oil & Gas Journal an active oil seep has been found in the Yankee Gold Mine in White Pine County, Nevada.  This mine operates on the western side of Long Valley and is one of the Carlin Type Deposits that has made Nevada the premier gold mining state in the United States.

A naturally occurring oil seep in sandstone
Photo by Lidenke

Carlin type deposits are a hydrothermally altered limestone of Paleozoic age that contain deposits of gold measured in micron sizes that are only visible under an electron microscope.  The same deposits are also noted as containing disseminated deposits of arsenic and locally hydrocarbons.  The Yankee deposit is the only known deposit in Nevada that has active oil seeps.  The discovery of oil seeps here are felt to be important to further exploration for gold in the Carlin Trend gold deposits, but also in the search for oil.

The oil seep was originally discovered when an oil wildcatter was preparing to drill a 7,000 foot deep oil well in the area of the mine and asked the then operator of the mine Kennecott if he could hook up a telephone connection to his drill site from the mine.  The oil seep was brought up when a mine employee casually told him there were hydrocarbons seeping onto the mine that was operating in a calcerous shale that according to some other employees were pooling on the ground under the seep.

An oil seep in limestone similar to the one in the Yankee Mine in Nevada
Photo by Lidenke

Although the discovery of an oil seep is important in this formation for the discovery of oil and what is more interesting however is the description of gold deposits. These are found in sedimentary deposits that were formed during the Paleozoic from Cambrian through Mississippian carbonate and siliclastic rocks that have been permeated by hydrothermal fluids. Many of these deposits are found in siltstone and limestone although some of them are found in calcerous shales are siltstones.

These older deposits of been covered by later deposits of the tuffaceous sedimentary rocks of tertiery age and by andesites that are about 30 million years old. The deposits are also characterized by veinlets of quartz, kaolin and stibnite.  There are further deposits of realgar and cinnabar.