Searchlight Mining District, Nevada - 1976

Mining & Minerals - Evaluations / Gold-Silver Exploration & Mining Projects

A PROPOSAL For Funding

• Recent experience in the Searchlight area indicates potential open-pit gold-silver deposits.
• Proposed is to negotiate with the four. major claim owners to obtain feasible leases. The cost of this initial phase would be $5,000.
• Phase two would commence upon the consumation of any lease agreements. For each property, the sampling and geology would cost $15,000. After the initial sampling and evaluation, a detailed report would be written and further exploration development/budgets prepared.
• The immediate production potential of the area is 100,000 tons of dumps that would average $25.00 per ton. This would gross about $2.5million and net about $2 million.
• The initial open pit potential is about 500,000 tons of 0.06 t.oz. Au/ton ore at a very low stripping ratio. This would gross $7. 5million and net about $5 million.

Location:

The Searchlight district is in the southern part of Clark County, Nevada, which is 56 miles south of Las Vegas on U.S. Highway 95, and 37 miles from the Union Pacific branch railroad to Boulder City (see map on the following page). The district discovered in 1897, has a recorded production of about $7,000,000.

The district lies in the low hills and pediment slope bordering the western flank of the Opal Mountains. Annual rainfall is about 9 inches. No surface water is available nearer than the Colorado River, 13 miles to the east, but water is obtainable from mine shafts at depths of from 145 to 225 feet.

GEOLOGY

Except for a small outcrop of Precambrian granite gneiss, the district is underlain by igneous rocks of presumed Tertiary Age (see  maps of the north and south portions of the District following location map). The oldest of these is andesite which was intruded by dikes and masses of andesite porphyry and later by a considerable mass of quartz monzonite. Following the quartz monzonite intrusion the andesite was largely altered to hornfels. Later fracturing of the hornfels near the quartz monzonite contact permitted the rise of vein-forming solutions and the emplacement of the metalliferous veins in the andesite near the contact. Another series of andesite flows, younger than the quartz monzonite and accompanying mineralization is exposed in the northwestern part of the district.

The veins that crop out in the older andesite and andesite porphyry are all near the quartz monzonite contact, suggesting that their position may have been determined by fracturing accompanying its emplacement.

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