BSRancher!!
Could Briggs Mine be reopening soon?
By Niche Publications Executive Editor
Published: Sunday, July 2, 2006 2:10 AM CDT
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Laura Dobbins/ldobbins@ridgecrestca.com
There may be enough recoverable gold around the Panamint Valley to reopen Briggs Mine pits, idled in 2004, before the end of the year.
A new series of tests suggest a significant quantity of gold and some ore is present at Cecil R. - a deposit located in the Panamint Mountains of southern Inyo County, said Canyon Resources Corporation, Briggs' sole owner.
“We are looking to reopen the Briggs Mine by November and could start looking for employees this fall,” Valerie Kimball, Canyon Resources investor relations said.
This statement might be premature, however, as local authorities point out there is still a lot to be done prior to reopening the mines and nothing has been set in stone.
Briggs General Manager Ken Mann said there was still a lot to accomplish before the mines could start operating again.
“We have had some good, positive drilling but the ore we found was pretty deep,” Mann said. “We have a lot to consider and we must first determine if it would be economically feesible to start mining again.”
Mann, while cautious, did say the recent tests were good news.
But with record high values on gold, Briggs' owners may want to capatilize sooner than later.
The price of gold soared to a 26-year high of around $730 an ounce in May. It has since fallen about 20 percent but has still doubled in value over last year.
“Restarting the Briggs Mine in light of today's gold market is a top priority,” Kimball said.
Canyon Resources would like to start hiring people as early as October and announced during a phone interview last week that it would post information on its Web site soon.
If officials should decide to reopen the mines, this would be good news for locals as the company provided jobs and a significant amount of revenue from property taxes. For nearly 15 years Briggs had been an employer for some living in San Bernardino and Kern counties - at one time it was a 125-employee operation.
The company was forced to scale back to the current 25 employees because the pits were nearly depleted of gold. Last year the workforce was reduced to 14 and currently there is a 10-person crew working on the mine closure process.
Meanwhile, Canyon Resources Corporation, plan to conduct further drilling, “to define the extent and grade of this mineralized material,” James, Hesketh, president and CEO said through a released statement.
The testing zone is located along the eastern flank of the Panamint Valley beneath weakly consolidated pediment gravel. Gold mineralization is hosted by a low-angle Tertiary-Age detachment fault located at the unconformable contact between the gravel and basement rocks of Precambrian gneiss.
Canyon Resources Corporation said that drilling has been conducted from 0 to 260 feet at the western edge of the zone are where gold has been found. A total of 41 holes had been previously drilled in the core of this deposit, from which a mineralized material of 4.1 million tons at an average grade of 0.029 ounces of gold per ton has been estimated utilizing a cutoff grade of 0.01 ounces per ton.
These current results are consistent with past results on this property, say authorities
Briggs Mine is already fully permitted with existing plants and infrastructure. Mining equipment at the site includes a 600 ton per hour three stage crushing plant, a carbon tower gold recovery plant, shops and offices.
Briggs Mine was built in 1996 and began full-scale operations in 1997. To date, the company has mined 535,000 ounces of gold and a total of 23.6 million tons of ore.
For more information on Briggs and Canyon Resources, please visit the company's Web site: www.canyonresources.com .
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