Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
The Forde Files No 93
The Golden Queen heap leach pad under construction. Tehachapi Mountains are to the north.
Construction workers discuss newly delivered materials, an old mine opening in the background.
View of Soledad Mountain and the heap leach pad seen from the north (facing south).
A construction worker checks out heavy equipment fresh from Japan -- the tires are still clean.
Shiny new specialized heavy mining equipment sits in front of an old mining structure.
The Hilfiker Wall where carriers will dump raw rocks that will be conveyed down the hill to be crushed in stages. Photos taken March 26, 2015.
An array of old bottles.
Photo taken November 2012 of ruins of a miner's home that since has been removed.
By the end of 2015, an old technology coupled with new environmental safeguards will begin to yield up gold and silver that is locked within ancient veins slicing through Soledad Mountain near Mojave.
The mountain -- adjacent to Hwy. 14 and looking like a nondescript rocky lump of desert -- has been mined by individuals and companies for a hundred years, but never on such a scale.
The Golden Queen Mining Co., LLC, a British Columbia-based company under the leadership of President, CEO and Director H. Lutz Klingmann, commenced $144 million in pre-production capital construction at the site in 2014. The operation will begin production approximately after October 2015. The company, which has an office on K Street in Mojave, currently has 10 full-time employees. That number will increase to 50 for pre-production mining and ultimately to a total workforce of 170. A recent Kern County-sponsored job fair brought more than 800 job-seekers to the Golden Queen booth, according to Ken Mann, Golden Queen manager-administration.
"We were overwhelmed with all the resumes," Mann said.
The jobs available include equipment and crusher operators and mechanics.
"We try and hire locally," Mann said.
The company provides training, he said.
The company makes a point of civic engagement. Golden Queen purchased four lots in downtown Mojave and donated them to the Chamber of Commerce as a site for the Chamber office, which is a caboose. Golden Queen also will build a park with a $10,000 Kern County Supervisor RENEWBIZ grant.
While the mining operation will yield 13 ounces of silver to every one ounce of gold, 80 percent of the revenue will come from gold, Mann said.
The open-pit, heap leach extraction method requires a vast and deep expanse of crushed rock (leach pad) through which a cyanide solution is pumped. The solution dissolves the gold and silver out of the rock. Zinc is added. The zinc attaches itself to the gold and silver, producing a sludge, which is melted into a doré bar. The doré bar, 60 to 70 pounds and about the shape of a loaf of bread, is mixed gold and silver – mostly silver. Golden Queen ships the bar to one of the handful of refineries in the United States, where it is refined to 99 percent pure gold and silver.
The leach pad, which will be built in 30-foot "lifts" into a 200-foot-high mass, is sloped and lined so the cyanide solution is captured and never released into the environment.
County mitigation requirements include taking the leach pad back to the original elevation, keeping dust down, recirculating water and monitoring animals that live in the area.
The Kern County Planning Commission approved the project on April 8, 2010.
Golden Queen Mining is listed as GQM on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The web site is http://www.goldenqueen.com.
A dark amber bitters bottle made in Marseilles
Miners have sought the riches of Soledad Mountain for more than a century. The Golden Queen Mining Co., Ltd., while razing the remnants of stone houses built on the flanks of the mountain by Serbs, Italians, French and other European miners, has preserved artifacts found during construction. In the collection of museum pieces at their office in Mojave is an array of old bottles.
