Ahhh the heady days of desert dirts! Long may they scam! Desert dirts attracted many. IPMCF was built out of the dregs of International Platinum on the theory that gold and pt metal nano clusters abounded in the deserts in the lee shadow of the Sierra Nevadas. Some semi credible reports used to waft out of Salt Lake City and Phoenix about gold in aquifers in the salt beds being unassayable etc.. like the dread telluride of Colorado fame. To be fair, telluride may have resisted accurate assay as asp.-rich ores do, but you could detect gold, whereas the dirts came up empty except by secret techniques.
The Salt Lake City stories of the 1980's were legend. Some assayers avowed that if one used a microwave oven and cooked the qtz. at high temps that the nano clusters popped out like corn in a hot pan, and were then assayable in cyanide solutions. hmmmmmmmmmmmm.. Articles about metal "nano-clusters" in reputable scientific journals such as Sci Am. led credence to the assertions of the dirters. The truth is even atomic gold in individual atoms will not resist fire assaying if proper roasting techniques are used. Kerr Addison mine in Virginiatown ON, had 25% of its pyrite-entrained gold trapped in atomic form, and the gold would not come out except in a roast followed by cyanide. The gold would however with attendant 10% losses, report to a fire assay. Much gold can be found in the flue of the furnace however.
The finest gold of the richest variety entrained in quartz was found in the Lead, SD area where lode gold in silica was as fine as 3000 mesh. (It is impractical or perhaps impossible to grind qtz. beyond a 1000 mesh mechanically, and of course qtz cannot profitably be roasted as pyrites can.) Gold ran to 3 ozs per ton; but while assayable in a furnace, it was totally unrecoverable economically by a conventional mill. I have some ideas about how I would get it out economically, but I will not talk unless I have control of a property. Many dollars and many years to go before that will happen.
As time passes all the old scams will be recycled again. It would be tempting to go back to some areas where fine, fine gold exists or may exist and try to see if there is something real behing all the bullshit, but so much assayable gold exists in so many mines not being exploited today that it seems much more profitable to merely work away at improving mine economics in conventional ores than go to all the trouble of tackling bears of mystery. The need to seek ways of getting gold out of seawater etc.. is just not that compelling.
The first assertions of desert dirt gold were late in the 19th century where prospectors brought plain desert sand in claiming there was gold in the desert varnish that had to be treated specially, much like the tellurides were at the time. Also in those days there were many assaying scams and Scottsdale, Arizona became the world hub of these schemes. Diamond flim flam raised its head and two prospectors from Sand Fran started a diamond rush in the Stateline area, swearing they found diamonds on a mesa top in Colorado. They later admitted they had salted the sample with South African diamonds, but 100 years later this was the site of the first diamond finds by Cominco in North America. Countless Kimerblites and diamond bearing lamproites abound in this area, though only one had any economics so far. mineralsocal.org
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