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I WANT MY MILLION DOLLARS!

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Contributed by: Dave Hughes on 3/31/2007

Did you read the great front page Gazette Story today, Saturday March 31st about the surprisingly successful Real Estate Project on top of the great Gold Hill Mesa Tailings piles on the Westside, across US24 from Old Colorado City?

In spite of the skepticism by the Reporter about the fact there are traces of 'toxic' metals like lead and zinc in that 14,000,000 ton pile that was left over after 40 years of milling gold from Cripple Creek that was carried down the mountain on the Midland Railroad, the fact is sales of the modern homes and condominiums are going great guns! 11 Contracts for sale are already signed, hundreds of people have come and looked, and even after they learn ALL (full disclosure) the details about what the upscale housing development sits on, they and all the regulators are happy and they buy! From $273 to$375,000 each.

But where is MY Million Dollars, I did NOT get, 30 Years ago when two partners split and never followed through with REPROSSESSING those 14,000,000 tons of GOLD ORE tailings! Pie in the sky? No way, there is - and the reporter didn't mention it, but in actual, hard, measured fact -there is STILL 578,000 ounces of GOLD and 2.7 million ounces of SILVER still in that big sand pile, worth at today's gold prices THREE HUNDRED EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS!

My never getting my little $1 million, which would have been 5% of Bill Wiley's 50% in 1976 when the price of gold was ONLY $100 an ounce - its $683 today - is some story! You can read it all on the Old Colorado City Historical Society's web site top page, in a Power Point presentation http://history.oldcolo.com. (the graphics are large so be patient, but the true story is ALL there)

The Technical and Economic essense of the story is this:

The Golden Cycle Mill which opened in 1906 processed over the 43 years of its existence, all those 14 million tons of ore getting, at the really low government fixed priceset $20 and $35 an ounce $250,000,000 in gold bullion!

BUT they processed all those tons for over 40 years (at about 1,500 a day hauled down from the mines,) using the highly efficient Cyanide process, which actually dissolved 97% of all the gold and silver into solution after the ore was crushed and ground and cooked over coal fires. BUT they had to use, for all those years Zinc powder to get the gold to come out of the solution. And THAT only got in the end, 93% of what was there in the sand pile. THEY LEFT 7% OF ALL THE GOLD in the tailings, because there was NOT hard enough charcoal known in the US to use for the more efficient Carbon-in-Pulp process. The loss with the sandpaper like stirring and processing too much charcoal and the gold in it, so AT THE GOLD PRICES THEN, they settled for the 93%. They weren't greedy! $200 million was enough.

That pile of Tailings STILL assays out at .0456 ounces of gold per ton (about a cubic yard) of that pile! (but don't think you can just sneak over there with a shovel and get some gold! A TON - 2,000 pounds - those gold tailings - at least a cubic yard, IF you hauled it off and IF you had a cyanide plus carbon process, you would only get $16 worth of gold, LESS what it costs you to do all that. It takes big volume and a plant before it would be economic! On the other hand if you took a chemical kit you would detect the presense of gold in every spoonful of that pile!)

So from 1948 when the Golden Cycle Mill and the Midland Railroad shut down, until 1976 when the Gold prices were set free, the sand pile just sat there. WHILEGolden Cycle not only moved its mill right into the Cripple Creek-Victor zone, opening the Carlton Mill, and PERFECTED the Carbon-in-Pulp process using what they discovered AFTER World War II that Coconut Husks from the South Pacific made very hard charcoal, which WOULD withstand the stirring and abrading, and they could reduce the ore they processed down to .02 ounces per ton!

Get it? That sand pile assays at .04 ounces a ton today. Golden Cycle once they moved got ore in the District (where they didn't have to haul it anywhere), down to .02 ounces per ton, getting out 98% of all the gold and silver. But they sold off all their tailings pile inside Colorado Springs as just plain real estate. (Dumb move, actually)

So ALL it would have taken in 1976 was to use hydraulic methods - not hard rock mining methods to move the sand pile, and use the Carbon-in-Pulp with the hard charcoal to Reprocess ALL 14 million tonsin 6 years and HALF of all the remaining Gold - or 289,000 ounces would be in the hands of the investors at the rate of 127 ounces of bullion a day. And me as one of the junior partners, would have gotten3 ounces a DAY gold bullion for 6 years, or 7,000 ounces worth todayfour and a half million dollars. And guess what?Because Gold is a Commodity, I would not have to pay taxes on it until I sold it for cash!!!!!

I even got the City Council to vote to permit 'mining' inside the City Limits on the Westside by the 'Gold Hill Recycle Project' because, using the hydraulic process, and levelling the eroded, ugly pile, it would be an act of RECLAMATION and not, as usual in mining ventures, a dig up Destruction of earth! After all the sand was reprocessed THEN building could be done on top of the acreage!

I want my Million Dollars!

So what happened? Well the partner investors fought with each other and they split, and the son of the one partner Bill Hadley is still alive and still owns lots of the land that is now part of the Real Estate venture and so is profiting from that.

And because it would have taken about $2.4 million to get the operation up and going, and operating costs would have been $15 million over the 6 years, nobody was willing to take a chance. And I did NOT have the $2.4 million to build the plant and get started processing the tailings.!

You can read all about it on line!

And if you are skeptical about those recovery figures I gave you, guess who is still TODAY in the Cripple Creek-Victor mining district, processing the same gold ore, using carbon in pulp even MORE effectively, and getting their tailingsdown to .01 per ton! A South African Gold Company is taking most of the bacon home! Just drive from Cripple Creek to Victor over that road and see on the hills, the 'pipes' trickling down through the tailings a dilute cyanide solution! They are sure making money producing gold!

And oh yeah Bob Willard, one of the investors in today's operation (it took him years and years to get the toxic waste regulators to approve his project,) saw my stand up presentation at the History Center. We are friends. I said to him "Bob, when the price of Gold reaches about $3,000 an ounce it will be worth your while to tear down all your houses and reprocess the whole hill again! Cause it will be worth over a Billion dollars!" And with a laugh, he said, "Well, maybe.But our purchase contract prohibits the home owners from mining from their basements!"

Look at all the pictures I have attached. I may add more.

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