Mr. Goldstein, thank you for your kind thoughts.
One property trying to play the "we're on the same PM river" card has been CHIP. However, all they have so far is a piece of land largely unexplored that appears to be along an extended route of the same river.
It would be similar to buying ANY land you could in Texas after the big oil strikes and telling people, "hey we have Texas land too!" As far as the geology of Death Valley Junction goes, Eagle Mountain is the only remaining mountain in the area but that geologic structure was the reason this great underground river turned course, wrapped around the mountain and continued on. The end result was that with a slowing river, deposits continued to amass at the Franklin Lake area. As to the original source, one theory which I have heard is that it was all from the very ancient volcanic activity surrounding the Franklin Lake area that brought the PM's up to the surface and the river just spread them into the valley basin which eventually got damned up, turned into a lake and presto! Franklin Lake was borne. This makes sense to me since Platinum in particular has a very high melting point and volcanic activity certainly would provide the needed degrees to bring it up to the surface. With the metals also being heavy, it is hard to say how far down stream they would be carried. Only exploration of the path of the river would tell us that, however, since the body of Franklin Lake was formed when the valley was damned up, it would stand to reason that the metals stayed close by as the valley was filled up. (remember that the "valley" no longer exists and Eagle Mtn is the only peak of that valley remaining.
All of the above is determined from the geologic record of the area. So my guess is that Franklin Lake is a unique situation. Not that it can't exist in other places, but they way THIS deposit formed was certainly likely to produce HIGH concentrations, more so than just a river depositing over many hundreds of miles those same PM's.
Regards,
Tom F. |
