San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
GOLD FEVER MAY STRIKE AGAIN
GRASS VALLEY, Nevada County — It’s been a long time since California’s Gold Country has churned out any big mining fortunes. The rush of prospectors and the blasting of ore have given way to small towns comfortable in the quiet of the foothills. The glory of the Mother Lode today lives largely in history museums, local tourism ads and an occasional bar named the Mine Shaft or Golden Era. But that doesn’t mean there’s no gold. For the past four years, a Canadian mining company has been in Nevada County, about 60 miles northeast of Sacramento, collecting samples of what it suspects is one of the
world’s highestgrade underground gold deposits, potentially worth billions.
Now that company, Rise Gold Corp., is drafting plans to get at the bounty by reopening the more than 150yearold IdahoMaryland Mine.
“There’s some really good targets that they left behind,” President and CEO Ben Mossman said, as he stood in his office in Grass Valley recently, looking at a map of the long-shuttered mine and its 73 miles of underground tunnels. “The fact that they planned to double production here before they closed says to us that they thought there would be a lot more gold.”
As Mossman turns to the task of getting approvals to unseal and activate the abandoned mine just east of Grass Valley’s city limits, however, the idea of reviving the region’s signature industry is beginning to meet resistance.
The legacy of gold, while widely celebrated, is not something that many in this area, now home to more retirees and Bay Area transplants than men in hard hats and overalls, want to revisit. Mining may have given rise to this community, and more notably, lifted the entire state from frontier to financial powerhouse, but the scars it left on the landscape remain visible, and unwanted.
Creeks still get mucked up with iron and sulfuric acid from old mines. Soils contain arsenic left over from drilling. The occasional driveway or hillside falls into an uncovered — and previously unknown — mine vent.
“Why does anyone in the world think it’s OK to bring back this toxic business?” said Christy Hubbard, 63, whose yard backs up to the Idaho-Maryland Mine and is part of the growing opposition. “We have an established residential community here now, and we’re talking about putting a gold mine right in the middle of it? ... They could be mining 200 feet under my house.”
Representatives of Rise Gold assure neighbors that today’s mining is not the trade of dusty caves, loud explosives and heavymetal runoff. Most of the work would be hundreds, if not thousands, of feet below ground, they say, and undetectable.
A consulting firm is working with the county to prepare an environmental impact report on the project. It’s designed to detail what modern mining would look like for the community and help the county Board of Supervisors decide whether to let Rise Gold push forward with an evocative piece of the past.
Earlier this month, Mossman made the fiveminute drive from his office to the main grounds of the Idaho-Maryland Mine.
It’s one of several parcels in the county that his company has spent $3.9 million acquiring since 2017. Rise Gold, headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, also has secured 2,585 acres of mineral rights, which cover the sprawling tunnels beneath the land as well as additional underground terrain extending below part of Grass Valley.
From the road, what little remains on the mine’s surface is hardly noticeable. The exception is a concrete silo that soars above the wooded property and covers a shaft that plunges more than 3,000 feet into the earth.
“We’re pretty enclosed by all these trees,” said Mossman, 43, a friendly, softspoken engineer from British Columbia, after driving through a locked gate to the deserted mining yard.
When the site was operational, as many as 1,000 workers came and went, helping make the IdahoMaryland one of the most productive underground mines in California history. It’s named after two of several mines that merged to form it.
The complex launched at end of the Gold Rush, in the 1860s. But the underground quartz veins that carry the gold and distinguish the region’s highvalue geology had a lot to offer here. The facility ran on and off through 1956, yielding a cumulative 2.4 million ounces of gold, worth more than $4 billion by today’s prices.
While the discovery of gold in California, and the boom that followed, remains a wellknown chapter of state history, the industry’s decline is a lesstold story.
Big mines like the Idaho-Maryland prospered into the 20th century but only until World War II. At that time, the federal government shut the gold mines to free up workers for military service. Most struggled to bounce back in the postwar economy, facing greater costs and increasing regulation.
“The world changed,” said John Clinkenbeard, a geologist formerly with the California Geological Survey and a leading expert on mining. “It was costing more to produce an ounce of gold than you got back. Most mines closed in the mid’50s.”
The gold industry moved to other states and continued abroad. Today, Nevada leads the United States in production, and like the handful of mines still operating in California, most gold is extracted from surface pits, not from costlier underground tunnels.
“If you’re going to mine underground like the oldtimers did it, you need highgrade gold to justify it,” Clin
“There’s some really good targets that they left behind. The fact that they planned to double production here before they closed says to us that they thought there would be a lot more gold.” Ben Mossman, president and CEO of Rise Gold Corp.