Apparently there are lots about. It seems a lot more common than I had guessed in my youth, where I had some faith in human charity. On the other hand, things I did quite early were based on my knowledge that you could not wangle a deal in principle if the deal were not proven to be profitable, even if the hypothetical assignment of profits cost nothing to make upfront. It seems we get a lot of our ideas from others throughout our life. Our development of them depends on others. It falls to people with business enterprise in search of synthesis to learn what they can of possibilities of profitable venture and exploit that for their own selves, for as little tie up as possible. The tendency to value what joint agreement for whatever moral worth it has, and their pooled intent and resources as infinitely more valuable than the trial balloons and intellectual property of others is the common finding. What most business people in search of solutions would have you believe is that ideas are a dime a dozen and properties are fall just experiments, not worth a pinch, until the munificent resources of the company are set upon them. If that is positively the case, then I guess whatever resources are gathered together may synthesize their own solutions without the aid of engineers, prospectors, geologists, or other technical people. Most money people have the idea that there is a fixed price of intellectual labour and ideas, and they can hire that concept for low bucks and arm waving about future opportunity. If we take the straight statistics of the mineral game, then it would seem that the failure rate being what it is, then properties should be valued at about 1% or less of their perceived profitable worth. While this is monstrously unfair, the difficulty of proving otherwise leaves us with a thorny problem. Let in any artificial means of assessing value as inviolate and the corruption to create mountains of undeserved share paper will creep in eventually. The TSXV has retreated not knowing how to evaluate any roll-ins with certainty and fairness, to a simple and unarguable tenet of monetary worth and financing so far, or the property being judged by previous work, or some unassailable and very stringent judgment of geological and engineering rectitude. This latter process of course has holes in it as wide as the sea. But the idea is to defeat shoddy propositions designed to create a paper flurry. No greater flurry of paper however could be created than exists now, where the brokers valuations of every new venture as essentially worthless unless mountains of cash are ready to back it. It raises the question of what could be left that nobody with a dollar doesn't know about already. It also raises the question of how reasonable prognosticators and clever operators may profit from eventual commercial proof of their bets. The meager share paper they allow to be released as exploration stages are met, hardly seems worthwhile if one is to make a living at prospection and promotion. You have to find financial people who are sagacious judges of management plans and geological chances. If met with the "market-only" groups, then you should back away, as they and you will not have the strength to stay with reasonable exploration programs through thick and thin. You have to have a balance between science, practicality and money. And of course the object is to make money. Everyone has to be able to sell their shares.
What I have found is that so called small mines, which are easy to find, and have high grade which looks good into rising prices of gold are the better bet. They are some hard to start in paper flurry markets as brokers do not do mining. Mining, simply by itself, does not sell paper. Only finding and promotion. So the whole business is geared to making money on the front end legals and fees, and promoting the hell out of new stories that look likely. Well so far so good. But they completely reject old properties, as they will tell you the track record is not good, or the mines are completely discounted, it's hard to find labour etc.. etc.. But is that so? Well no, actually. In fact there are many areas where old mines or old drill-offs did indeed get expanded mightily. Or new stories found there way into old mining districts. Hemlo was a case in point. In fact Teck had inherited a property called Lake Superior Mining. Depending on how you figured the grade it was either 500,000 tons of 0.3 OPT, or 0.5 OPT. Not shabby at all. And if you mined it 30 feet wide, it held 0.15 OPT steadily.
But you find that proving gold mines, often needs drill holes ever 100 feet -- and that takes a lot of money to build tons, and slowly.
To build 3 million ounces of 15 foot wide 0.15 OPT ore at a drill hole center of 100 feet takes one thousand six hundred drill holes. Now I can tell you within about 300 holes in all probability that is what we will find, but to absolutely do a feasibility the former figure is what you need. If the body is 3,000 feet long which is plenty long for a mineral ore body, then some of the holes will have to be 5000 feet deep. You can see the difficulty. 100 foot center holes average about 2900 feet in length. Well as I said you don't need all those holes, and nobody drills them to that depth, even with wedges from mother holes, but if you did that would cost about 280 million dollars to complete. Step back to about 500 holes mostly to 1800 feet with a few deep holes to prove the point and you can scale that back to about $30,000,000, but it is still hugely ambitious.
Now I compare that to the economics of an open pit mine in oxide ore in the tropics or desert location, and we need perhaps a deep hole to 1000 feet, we are running into widths of between 100 and 600 feet, and right away the drill holes shrink by an order of magnitude. We can see what we have in about 30 to 80 drill holes. In addition our required grade shrinks from 5 grams minimum to perhaps 1.5 grams. Our scale goes up, but costs to put in leaching plants is less. Recovery is acceptable. 85% and more. If we stay away from refractory ore, stay in good politics and light regulatory and taxation regimes, then we can get going with a lot more gold for a lot less. Hence the flight to Arizona, Nevada, Chile and Peru in the seventies. Labour is cheaper, the bribes lighter than the cost of meeting envi regs and delays of our more obfuscating governments. However, risk, both personal and corruption based is higher. Mexico, Peru, and Argentina are no picnic. For many years Columbia was simply unacceptable. We have seen the many forms of right wing and left wing corruption in Venezuela as horrifying. Not worth it there for sure. Back in the seventies mining developers told me that they had 12 years in Mexico and then the government would step in, so you had to plan accordingly. Well that part may have improved but danger is in certain states to be figured carefully and the corruption is still rife. People we know have lost orebodies to out and out government theft. And still success stories are everyday. So you only see the surface. So where do we find politics, regs, ore etc available and tractable. Well look around, the answers are there. No hints but there are places.
I am beginning to doubt that Ontario is that easy. In fact its government is distinctly anti-mining. The Boreal Forest initiative proposes to withdraw permanently an area in Ontario of 3 million square kilometers, in which perhaps three mining camps thrive, and has produced Ontario's only diamond mine. In this area 1000 kimberlites were drilled by De Beers in 35 years. While Quebec touts its industrial progressiveness, its rate of withdrawl of mining lands for the flimsiest reasons is alarming. The maps is turning steadily orange*, all the way north to the shores of James Bay *(the colour of withdrawn lands on claim maps). One Quebec government report I bought shows oxide copper on the surface of lands with no overburden at all. Showings of green stuff running up to 4.3% Cu. Fine. But looking closer you see that the showings and most of the related geology is encompassed by a newly formed park. Making me wonder which came first. There is one area like that in Ontario as well on the shores of Lake Superior just north of Sault Ste. Marie. There are more unusual mineral showings of interest catalogued than I have seen anywhere else. You name it it comes to surface in quantity. Naturally it is a provincial park.
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