My visit to
Silverado Gold
Bob Moriarty
August 11, 2003
For each of the last five years,
I have gone up to Alaska in July. For the first three of those
years I went up to mine a small creek 60 miles north of the Arctic
Circle. Both last year and this, I went up to Fairbanks to attend
the annual Alyeska auction to buy a truck.
Since I was in Fairbanks and
had transportation, I thought I would call Silverado and see
if I could make arrangements to see their Nolan Creek operation
in full swing. I did and went up three weeks ago.
 I filled the truck with fuel and headed
up the Dalton Highway from Fairbanks. The Dalton runs from Fairbanks
to Prudhoe Bay and allows access to the Alaska pipeline. My memory
of the drive over the past few years is that it's pretty rough,
just gravel most of the way and hell on windshields.
I must be getting old and senile
at the same time. This year it was a piece of cake, unlike my
memory. It wasn't until I got back to Fairbanks that someone
mentioned that they have paved most of it. It's a better road
by far than that of two or three years back.
But in any case, I shot up
the Dalton Highway 280 miles north from Fairbanks, a good 100
miles north of the crossing of the Yukon and 60 miles north of
the marker for the Arctic Circle. Finding the Nolan Creek mine
is about as difficult as falling off a bike, 278 miles north
of Fairbanks take a left turn as if you are going to Wiseman
and at the fork in the road, continue to the right to Nolan Creek.
It was that easy.
I pulled in on a Sunday night.
Brian Flanigan, chief geologist for Silverado was there to guide
me. We grabbed safety hats and went to wander around for a couple
of hours. At this time of year you have constant sun which can
be disorienting for those not used to it.
 The
Nolan camp is far larger than I imagined but Silverado has been
operating there on and off for the best part of 30 years. And
during that time the camp has grown a lot. It can accommodate
about 50 people, and there are about 30 people working there
now. I stayed at the camp for two nights. It wasn't the George
Cinq, but they do have telephones and high speed internet connections
via satellite, and 3 cooks. And the food was quite a bit better
than one would expect in a remote mining camp.
It's a small world. The head
of security there was door gunner in an H-34 in Quang Tri, in
1968, when I was flying Birddogs. As a matter of fact I was involved
in an operation where the last Marine H-34 got shot down, in
early 1969, but that's another (a sad) story.
 The
question of whether or not there is global warming is not asked
in Alaska. They know it's real. Last winter was the warmest winter
on record and had a negative effect on the operation at Nolan
Creek. Since they can blast and mine the permafrost only when
it's frozen, the warming trend and resulting thaw cut the amount
of gravel they could blast and stockpile almost in half.
Silverado is producing gold,
some extraordinary gold including an almost 5 ounce nugget (now
for auction on eBay) and an 8 ounce nugget. It will be the
end of the summer before they know how well they have done overall,
though.
 Brian
showed me around the property although the entire property couldn't
properly be toured in less than a week. They have a lot of property.
He had laid out an extensive drill program which had to be cut
back due to financial constraints but was enthusiastic about
the chance of literally finding the "mother lode,"
the source of the massive nuggets so common at Nolan Creek.
While they didn't do as much
mining as they hoped during the winter, the Silverado crew was
hustling to mine and process as much ore as they could during
the fleeting days of summer. The Silverado placer processing
plant is the most expensive and sophisticated in all of Alaska
and they keep it fed on a constant basis.
  I was shown some of the beautiful
nuggets. They sure beat anything that ever showed up in my gold
pan. Oh, well.
Silverado Gold Mines is quoted
on the OTCBB under the stock symbol SLGLF. There are about 95
million shares trading and as of Friday Aug 8th, the stock was
quoted at $.21.
.
This is neither a buy nor sell
recommendation. Silverado is an advertiser and we do both buy
and sell shares on occasion.
Bob Moriarty
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Email bob@321gold.com
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