APACHE MINE

The Weepah Project lies on the south flank of the “Weepah Pluton”, a westward extension of the much larger Lone Mountain Pluton. Lone Mountain is a prominent mountain approximately nine miles west of Tonopah and lies within the “Walker Lane Belt”, a 100km wide zone of northwest-trending mountain ranges related to a right-lateral Shear Zone, east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Within the Walker Lane, more east-west trending structural trends are recognizable. These include Lone Mountain and the Weepah Hills. The transverse structural grain of such features is thought to be related to transform faulting where strike-slip faulting is accommodated by oblique structure.The Silver Peak-Lone Mountain region is documented by regional mapping to represent a metamorphic-core complex where the Mesozoic-age plutons have domed the Cambrian and Precambrian rocks of the lower plate and exposed the sole structure. The upper plate of the detachment is constituted by Tertiary rocks and less intensely metamorphosed Paleozoic rocks separated by a décollement from the lower plate, amphibolite-grade metamorphic rocks of early Cambrian age. The movement along the detachment structure continues to present time.

Portable X-Ray Fluorescence field units (also known as XRF guns) are commonly used by large commercial mining operations, well-equipped/funded private prospectors and even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as many other government agencies for the most accurate field sampling in the quickest amount of time. In no way do we advise that you base all of your commercial mining valuations on just one or two samples (regardless of how accurate the method that you use to sample is), but this extremely precise and versatile $40,000 device is equipped with powerful X-ray tubes, specialized filters, highly advanced detectors, and multi-beam optimization that efficiently analyzes the chemistry of the rock, soil, and sediment that hosts metals, for a quick and extremely accurate analysis of even trace levels of metals like silver, lead, gold, platinum, copper and many other elements.

Today’s highly sensitive XRF Handhelds (we use the best unit available on the market – an Olympus Delta Premium with a full mining package) work by emitting an x-ray beam with enough energy to displace the electrons in the inner shells of the atoms that differ from the energy it gives off leading to a loss of energy in that atom. The specific loss of energy identifies the elements that are present in the sample. While fire assay is still the most widely used way to gauge how much or a particular metal (like gold and silver) is present in a sample since it can test the entire sample, it is an expensive process and takes many weeks to get an answer. XRF technology is the fastest and most accepted method in existence today for sampling a few millimeters (or deeper depending on the type of host rock sampled) into the surface of even the hardest rock, and the accuracy is measured in 1 to 2 parts per million (PPM).

Weepah Mining District History

Weepah Mine in the County of Esmeralda Nevada Overview 2008 History Weepah was the last of the true “gold-rush” mines back in the late 1920s. First discovered by the Shoshone Indians in 1902 it became a household name in 1927 when a local man discovered a nugget assaying $78,176 per ton at a time when the gold price was a mere $20.67 per ounce. Very soon Weepah was famous in the West and a temporary town of several thousand people grew up with prospectors flooding in looking for the proverbial crock of gold. By the 1934 the mining became more organized and the Weepah Mining Company invested in mechanized equipment to begin the excavation of the famous Weepah open pit; the first open pit gold mine in Nevada. At the same time a pipeline was run 7 miles to bring water to the newly constructed stamp mill and 300 tons/day cyanide flotation plant. The water was pumped from a well on the edge of a dry lake at an elevation of about 1,400ft lower than the storage reservoir at the mine. The 100 ft well supplied about 100 gals/min pumped through a 4” pipe in two stages. The booster pump was situated about half way between the well and the mine. During this brief period the mine became the largest producer in Nevada for a short period and even in 1937, just one year before it closed, Weepah was still the third largest gold producer in Nevada. One year later the costs had escalated and the boom was over. Weepah shut down the mill and stopped production. During the “boom” years, actual production of gold realized just under $2 million for the owners. The deposit was always a low-grade deposit and never lived up to the $78,176 per ounce hype of 1927. However, as a high-volume, low-grade deposit it continued to live on. Since 1938, dependent on the gold price, the mine was in production intermittently, although the processing was conducted elsewhere. In the 1950s Paul Burkett, The Weepah founder, acquired the strategic patented and unpatented claims in and around the Weepah mine. On and off during the next several decades he continued to conduct geological exploration aimed at establishing the true extent of the Weepah vein system. In 1986 he leased the property to Sunshine Mining Company based in Silver Peak. In October 1986 Sunshine opened their “new” Weepah gold mine to supply their mill in nearby Silver Peak in Esmeralda County. They began mining gold ore from the open pit at a rate of about 1,000 tons per day. Earlier in the year, owing to depressed silver prices, Sunshine had closed its “Sixteen-to-One” silver mine at Silver Peak and converted the existing mill there to process Weepah ore. Gold production at the Weepah was anticipated to be about 30,000 ounces per year. Sunshine mined Weepah until 1987 and during that period they mined in excess of 60,000 ounces of gold at an average grade of 0.09 ounces Au/ton and over 200,000 ounces of silver at a stripping ratio of 1:1. At the time it closed, Sunshine estimated several hundred thousand tons of ore reserves were remaining in the pit with indications of further potential reserves in the immediate surrounding area. Again the price of gold dropped and Sunshine shut down their operations at Weepah. It reverted back to Paul Burkett (who subsequently vested it in Pacific Gold, Inc. in the 1990s) and eventually it was leased in 1995 to a publicly listed Canadian mining company, Coromandel Resources Ltd, who embarked on a major exploration program over the next two years. The deal was part of a wider project that Coromandel called “the Weepah geological model” and demonstrated the huge potential that they envisaged for the total operation.