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More Than One Way To Make Money In Prospecting


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Wow! Never Heard of it before? :blink:

Good for  You Chris!

:wink:Cheers, Ig

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Hi Chris,

You mention that it's tough to find claims that mining companies want. Care to give any info on the mineral/type of deposit you are leasing out?

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What was involved in proving it up? Like run a small placer plant or process a couple tons of hardrock + assays?

That was my goal too but I never really found anything that seemed commercial to me and they all played out when I was trying to prove them up. Do you have mining industry connections or did you just contact the companies directly with a proposition?

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Its a hard rock property adjacent to an open pit mine that was worked in the 1980s and early 1990s. The biggest huge pieces of gold there are half a millimeter in size (and not many of them), so no placer. It was valuable mostly for its location. I did some assays, but its pretty low grade - but that's what it was - a low grade open pit mine. I think I staked it around 2004 when the price of gold was still low and no one was interested. A mining company acquired the adjoining property and they contacted me. A day's work of staking and a few hundred of filing fees - worked out to be a pretty good investment.

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Hmm yeah it seems like the mining companies try to avoid this happening these days by just blanket paper staking any historically commercial level mining areas and then 2 miles around them just to be safe. Ran into it happening a couple times in the middle of nowhere NNV, both times were just crews of kids not long out of college for surveying or geology, who weren't even making real discoveries, just pounding stakes and hanging paper every 20 acres as contractors for some big companies they wouldn't name.

Have you had any luck finding and then selling claims to mining companies after like 2012 or so?

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6 hours ago, jasong said:

Have you had any luck finding and then selling claims to mining companies after like 2012 or so?

As I mentioned in the original post, the market now is poor for selling and also poor for finding new ones. You have to go counter to the market. around 2004 and for a few years before that there were a number of good properties you cold have picked up for the time and effort of staking and filing. Gold was considered a dead holdover from the past, it had wafted down and further down for years. No one was interested in gold mining. But 5 years later when the fed started pumping money into the system, the price and market for gold boomed for a few years in selling properties - there were buyers. Now darn near everything is staked but no one can raise money to explore, few are letting property go, but just holding on in case things get better. Most of the stuff being let go is the dregs of the dregs, and no one is interested.

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Would you say there is any mineral sector you see as underexploited right now as gold was back then?

I keep eyeballing REE's because it sure seems like global energy/auto/electronics industry is headed that direction now and for the future too, plus there are no active mines left in the US (unless that one in CA reopened?) and they are mostly in China (or were until recently anyways). Not easy to prospect for though like gold. But some of the associated minerals/elements are easier to prospect for such as thorium. What do you think about that sector?

edit: this thread split and this question answered at http://www.detectorprospector.com/forum/topic/3286-prospecting-for-lithium/

 

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