Even though they have put down thousands of dollars, the buyers often stop paying on their claims part way through the process after they realize they’ve been duped, but the company just sells it again to another buyer.

Within this area, about two million ounces of gold and fifty million ounces of silver have been mined. Faults, dikes, veins and fissures that carry the ore form a concentric radial pattern—like spokes on a wagon wheel—around the caldera core.

While recovery rates are important, they must necessarily be secondary to the volume of material processed. Running more material at lower recovery rates is generally preferable to increasing the efficiency of the system.

We all continued over to another location at the top of a massive placer operation. Arriving at the draw, I showed everyone where gold had been found before and we all began detecting.