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Mojave gold mine project stands alone
| Friday, Jul 18 2008 6:25 PM
Last Updated: Monday, Jul 21 2008 7:12 AM
With the price of gold reaching record highs in recent years, a mining project near Mojave marches alone as the only gold mine going through the permit process in California.
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| Year | Troy Oz. | Value | Average Price/Oz. |
| 1848 | 11,866 | $245,301 | $20.67 |
| 1849 | 491,072 | $10,151,360 | $20.67 |
| 1852 | 3,932,631 | $81,294,700 | $20.67 |
| 1865 | 867,405 | $17,930,858 | $20.67 |
| 1883 | 1,176,329 | $24,316,873 | $20.67 |
| 1915 | 1,085,646 | 22,442,296 | $20.67 |
| 1933 | 613,579 | $15,683,075 | $25.56 |
| 1935 | 890,430 | $31,165,050 | $35 |
| 1974 | 5,049 | $807,000 | $159.26 |
| 1980 | 4,078 | $2,498,000 | $612.74 |
| 1993 | 1,149,807 | $414,977,000 | $359.82 |
| 2004 | 95,700 | $39,200,00 | $409.72 |
| 2007 | 19,400 | $13,000,000 | $695.39 |
Photos:
An aerial view of the Golden Queen mine site at Soledad Mountain located about five miles south of Mojave.
A West Vancouver, Canada-based company plans to employ up to 165 people at Soledad Mountain, a proposed open pit mine about five miles south of Mojave.
Lutz Klingmann, president of Golden Queen Mining Co., said he hopes to gain approval by the end of this year to start operation at Soledad Mountain.
The now defunct Gold Fields America Development Co. oversaw a mine on the property from 1935 to 1942.
Statewide, no large operations are actively mining gold, and regulators say that’s because of restrictions put into place in recent years.
Gold was once the lifeblood of Kern County. In the late 19th century, Havilah and other nearby towns attracted people from across the country and centered their economies around the precious metal.
But gold mining operations dwindled as resources drained, and a federal order shut off all nonessential mining during World War II.
“There was no more gold mining or anything like that — only mining for strategic metals like tungsten, iron and copper,” Kern County Historical Society member George Gilbert Lynch said. “That’s when the gold mining just practically stopped in the 1940s. They needed the manpower to run the mines for strategic metals. They didn’t need any gold.”
Today, most mines in Kern County are used to excavate sand, gravel, clay and limestone.
Scott Denney, a supervising planner with the Kern County Planning Department, said many companies are not applying for gold mines because of a 2002 state regulation that requires all metallic mines to be backfilled, a process in which material taken from the site to create the mine is returned to the pit.
“That was a substantial change in mining activities in the state of California, and as a result, there really are no mines that are being proposed because of that requirement,” he said.
Don Drysdale, a spokesman for the state Department of Conservation, said the reclamation process is expensive, and cost depends on the size of the operation and amount of material that needs to be moved.
Denney said reclamation can take between five and seven years depending on environmental conditions.
“In Kern County, our mines for the most part are returned to open space wildlife habitats, so they try to mimic what the land looked like prior to mining,” he said.