BLACK CANYON CLAIMS: 480 ACRES: 577,980 OUNCES 

      PRESENT SITUATION 

This is a fully permitted mining operation.  All environmental reviews have been completed and approvals have been granted.  All Federal, State and County permits are issued allowing mining to begin.  

Prior to the mining operation, which should begin this spring-summer, some housekeeping will need to be accomplished.  A fall has occurred in the South Tunnel which will require about a one week cleanup.  The settling ponds also will need to be cleaned out.  The tunnel floor is very rough and needs to be surfaced to facilitate better rubber tired haulage.  The North Tunnel needs to be shored and timbered to facilitate its use in the mining operation and as a secondary route to the mine.    

 

RESERVES 

We cannot determine the reserves with a high degree of accuracy until additional seismic and core drilling are completed, this will allow  us to accurately determine the meanderings of this channel and the thickness of the gravel deposits.  Although this is a placer gold operation, two geologic reports on this property suggest a drilling operation as there is good evidence of lode gold deposits as well as another channel.  It is also difficult to determine if there are tributaries of any length along the channel.  We can, however, reach a conservative estimate by taking the shortest line between two known mining points of the channel we are now prepared to mine (a route we know the stream did not take).  These two points are the Macedon Tunnel Mine and the East Black Canyon Mine, a distance of nearly 4,700 feet from the East Black Canyon Mine portal to the east boundary of the claims.  We then subtract the 600 feet which has been partially mined and arrive at 4,100 feet of channel remaining.  Some of the side tunnels have determined the width of the channel to be approximately 150 feet.  We know the thickness is at least 40 feet as some of the rooms in the old workings are that high.

 Gold production from the 600 feet of this channel mined at the neighboring Green Mine reported 1.50 ounces per linear foot, which would calculate out to about 1.69 ounce per cubic yard.  It is estimated that approximately 1.00 ounce of gold per cubic yard of gravel has been recovered from the Black Canyon Mine to date.  If we average breasting out 150 feet and average a depth of 30 feet of gravel, we should have 700,000 cubic yards of gravel to process. We are using a conservative number of 577,980 ounces of gold.  These figures do not take into consideration additional gravels which may be mined from tributaries or the extension of the channel to the west or lode deposits.  

 

  GEOLOGY

 Most of the East Black Canyon claims are covered by a mixture of volcanic and sedimentary rocks.  These rocks have been identified as rhyolitic and dacitic lapilli tuff white, gray and pink in color, dark-gray to greenish-gray olivine hypersthene basalt flows, breccia and welded tuff, gray andesitic tuff breccia and lahar deposits.  Below the rhyolitic tuff sequence are quartz rich gravel deposits and locally you can find volcanic gravel lenses between rhyolitic and andesitic volcanic sequences.  These rocks lie unconformably on the auriferous tertiary gravels of Eocene Age and the later intervolcanic channels.