I take a tour with Grant ...

Gold! Everyone thought it was gone, but it's not

There's Still Gold in Eldorado

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It's a sweaty, buggy day. Grant leads the way, stooping over as we fight our way beneath the bush. It's a horrible tangled mess thats wound with rusting barbed wire and pits lurking within the densest thickets. Grant curses to himself, dentures popping out as he swigs from a coke bottle that he carries. He's still recovering he informs me, from a moonshine binge the night before, that and his bush-grown weed which must have been the final straw. We speak about  plans to extract  his car - it's in a ditch nearby. I take a break on a dry-stacked wall, clearly infrastructure from the gold rush - Ontario's first, at a time when a great transient population was looking for adventure..

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Imagine this: a lost mine on the Arabian peninsula, hidden somewhere between Medina and Mecca, nestled along ancient trade routes. There, amongst the shallow pits, lies what’s believed to be the legendary Orphir Mine of King Solomon. To me, this abandoned Eldorado site is a little reminiscent of that mythic place. It seems to have slipped from public memory and like Orphir, there's still much to be gathered from Eldorado. Recent tests show that there are still vast amounts of gold scattered amongst the debris of the Orphir Mine. So, how did we lose track of where the gold came from? It’s still there—waiting for extraction. Records indicate that slaves at the Orphir Mine used cobbles to crush gold-bearing quartz, carefully picking out the tiny flakes by hand. What human effort was required to fill King Solomon’s coffers? What hopes were crushed and fortunes wasted in both these now abandoned places?

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The thought of buried wealth plucks a sentiment in those of us who are treasure hunters, addicted to the adrenaline of possibility. We can’t ignore the pull of gold and you begin looking with a pan that you’d ordered off Amazon, it has custom designed ridges and great reviews. Huge excitement heralds your first outing, your wife waves you off at the door, but you come home in a cloud of disappointment. You’re reminded that if gold was that easy to find, the river banks would be crowded with others like yourself and their mail-ordered equipment. If you’d been thinking straight you’d have waited till reality set in and at the end of the day scooped up equipment abandoned in disappointment.

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All the Gold Ever Mined Can Fit in a 20-Meter Cube

Now, think about this for a moment: All the gold ever mined in human history  could fit inside a 20 meter square cube. Every hurricane blown Spanish galleon that floundered on a Caribbean reef, everything in fort Knox, every golden bangle in India combined could be melted into that single gleaming box. It’s Mind-blowing, right? So, how do we find this precious metal and add to the          sum total?

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How Is Gold Found?

Well gold doesn’t just appear—it’s a complex process of erosion, transportation and concentration. Initially surface gold is spewed from the earth’s interior within mid oceanic trenches. Molten magma wells up with trace gold to replenish the continental crust. Initially gold atoms are thought to have formed in a process termed as “Rapid neutron capture” which takes place in the unimaginable conditions of a neutron star collision.

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Deep in the oceanic trench from whence the continents are born, cooled rock then moves off conveyor belt-like with its trace gold in either direction. Gold is a rare element found at about 4 parts per billion in those forming crustal rocks. The key to the discovery of a profitable deposit lies in how gold is bought together and without the nimble fingers of one of Solomon’s gold-picking slaves there’s only time and natural processes to consider, but in those natural processes lies a secret, a secret that gold prospectors the world over should consider. The gold can be in plain sight but remain unseen. Many a rich deposit has been overlooked for this reason.

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Mechanism #1: Weight
Relative weight is the first mechanism of concentration. Gold is incredibly heavy, far denser than most other minerals. When it's eroded out of rock, it gets moved by wind and water, accumulating where natural obstacles stop its flow. Imagine a river with an inner bend or a deep fissure—these are the places where gold tends to settle. Gold’s density is 20 times that of water, so when the water slows down, gold sinks and concentrates with other heavy materials, unlike lighter quartz and sand; they just float away. Considering how little success gold panners have had in Ontario you’d think that there’s no gold to be had here, but its not the case. In 2022 3.9 million troy ounces was extracted from the province’s rock. It’s a quantity valued at 5.4 billion. There’s tons of gold in Ontario - litteraly

The Ice Age’s Role

So again you ask, why is my pan empty?

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Around 14,000 years ago, the last Ice Age ended, and glaciers scraped back across where they’d already come from. Gold that had been concentrated by rivers in the pre-glacial landscape had been carried southward by the ice; it was left in drumlins, moraines and eskers up as far as the banks of the Mississippi River. Re-dispersing the gold ruined the concentrating effect of millions of years of flowing water. What resulted from that unintended redeposition was glacial features that are gold bearing, but uneconomical for mining.

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Mechanism #2: Hydrothermal Fluids

The second mechanism of concentration involves the movement of super-heated waters, also known as hydrothermal fluids. The water is heated by a nearby magma body, known as a batholith or pluton in geological terms. This heated water that carries the gold is rich in carbonates (often from limestone or dolostone). Fissures formed near the surface, due to the rising batholiths. They act as conduits where these hydrothermal fluids deposit minerals that precipitate with decreasing pressure and temperature

One famous example of this process is the Comstock Lode in California's Sierra Nevadas. Running parallel to a batholith, this gold deposit became the prime attraction for thousands of miners who flooded the state during the 1849 gold rush. It was known as "free milling" because the gold was relatively easy to extract, often visible to the naked eye.

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Gold in the Canadian Shield

The western edge of the Canadian shield, where the majority of Canada’s gold is found, is riven with  fissures and fault lines, they call them breaks and the off chutes are called splay faults. Geologically this area is referred to as the greenstone belt and enormous quantities of gold have been mined from the faults on either side of the belt. Though it is the gold that is most ardently sought, there are many other minerals that have been concentrated near the surface in such fissures.

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Just south of Eldorado is Madoc and there it is possible to see deposits that have filled a huge fracture that runs for several miles, passing under Stoco Lake and the town. Its thought to be a tectonic feature that hosts the area’s mines – part of the Ottawa –Bonnechere Grabben. Its the same concept, as the northern ‘breaks”, its just that the element in Madoc is fluorite and in Timmins it’s gold. So the concentration process is quite common, its just that the terrain through which the water has passed can hold a wide range of minerals and in Madoc’s case it was fluorite that was re-located by the hydrothermal fluids not gold.

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Gold in Madoc: A Historical Discovery

In 1866, a man named Marcus Powell was digging in a copper vein on the Richardson farm just north of Madoc. He never expected the ground  to collapse beneath him, but it was his lucky day. A  hidden cavern was revealed that was lined with sheets of gold. A nugget the size of a butternut sat there in front of him. News soon got out and it set off a gold rush. Yet, despite the excitement, the prostitutes, the expectant miners and the scammers, not another ounce of gold was found. Cariboo    Cameron led a mob that threatened to storm the Mine property to see if the gold really existed. The Mounties settled the uprising with  a compromise. Caribou went in to confirm the existence of gold. The mob was satisfied, but where was the rest of the gold? How could it accumulate exactly there in that hole and nowhere else. Well it had to get there up a fissure and be concentrated by some kind of natural process, well there-in lies the secret.

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Refractory Gold: The Key to Unlocking More

Sometimes, gold isn’t just sitting there, easy to grab. It can be trapped in other minerals, like arsenopyrites. In cases like that, the gold is said to be "refractory," locked inside a mineral's crystal structure. You can’t see it, but its there. This gold is more challenging to extract, but when the mineral breaks down, it can release gold in the process. So, it’s possible that the gold discovered in that cavern could have been hidden in arsenopyrites and in a natural decomposition process it was released into Marcus’s hidden cavern. It would appear that iron and copper puyrites are a        regular feature in other nearby gold mines, along with arsenopyrite. There are several failed         gold mines within a few kilometers. All were extracting free-milling gold. Seeing the          arsenopyrite crystals piled atop several of the Eldorado properties shafts I’m wondering what’s wrapped up in the hidden     world of their atomic structure and how far beneath the initial hole      the arsenopyrites extend?. 

Kim Woodward, once owner of the Eldorado Mine property stands in front of the thick mustard colored layer that stretches above the fissure that Marcus powell fell into - "See here is his blast      hole and down there is where he fell. there's 37 different types of mineral in this layer. It came     from way down deep and is unusual as most of the other rock layers around here are horizontal. amongst other minerals there are radioactives, silver, copper and rare earths."

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​The Role of Arsenic

Arsenic plays a crucial role in concentrating gold, its like a sponge that draws up all the gold around it. When gold combines with arsenic, it forms a stable bond, bringing the gold atoms closer together—sometimes by a million times more than they would naturally be. This process will make gold invisible to the naked eye, but it’s still there. As the arsenopyrite weathers and breaks down, gold may be released from its imprisonment in a process called “Brittle deformation”.

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Modern Exploration and the Future of Gold

A recent geologist’s survey just north of the Eldorado property indicates a treasure trove of over 145,000 ounces of gold still buried beneath the surface. But much of this gold is refractory, tied up with arsenic, making it harder to extract without specialized methods. Yet, the potential for wealth is huge – overlooked before knowledge caught up with observation.

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Legacy of the Richardson Family

The gold in Eldorado isn’t just a historical footnote. John Richardson, who owned the property where Marcus Powell made his discovery, passed down a simple gold ring to each of his children about 160 years ago. Today, the Richardson family still gathers in Eldorado, with six descendants each wearing those same rings, minted from Marcus’s initial discovery, symbolic of a story that’s still to be continued. I believe that the plot is written in the lattice of the arsenopyrite and a fissure that extends down beneath the original mine. Down below where people dug and got discouraged.