Impressions of the Project

I think I should jot down some impressions of yesterday’s trip to the future mine site/gold resource.
First of all, the tour was very well run. We were under constant threat of rain, but the organizers were able to move things around (we even flew around one storm in our helicopter). Despite the weather, I was able to see just about everything.
The geology is great. That’s what the tour was about, showing how, millions of years ago, a volcano laid down gold and a vast treasure trove of other minerals. Like some other projects (Endeavour Silver is a good example), when it was first explored by another company years ago, they missed the big enchilada. More than that, the original company missed this gold resource completely. They drilled vertically, because that’s how the gold should have been deposited in the hydrothermal mineralization. But the ground fractured and shifted, tilting the deposit and putting it at an angle.
The company I visited figured that out. They found the cap of the system, where there is no gold. They found the middle zone, where there is enough gold to mine. And they found the “boiling zone” – where the epithermal fluids boiled and deposited bonanza grade gold.
We were in a beautiful part of the Dominican Republic, so some people might say “don’t put a mine there.” You know who would disagree with that outlook? The people who live there. They are desperate for jobs. On one part of the tour, we landed in the field of a farmer who lived with his wife and six kids in a shack that was so ramshackle you could see through the spaces between the boards.
For now, the miners are being very careful not to cut down any tree they don’t have to. The trails are no wider than the drilling machines. Once they start mining, it will be different, but you can bet your bottom dollar the people who live around there will line up for the jobs it creates.

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