Word: goldings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...than a huge impact. The force of more than half a ton of explosive rattles the bones. There is a short, odd silence, followed by a series of low, menacing rumbles. That means the charges have done their work. Aftershocks have shaken loose more than a thousand tons of gold-bearing rock from the ceiling of the cavern. Smoke tumbles up the nearby escape shaft, thick with the acrid scent of ammonia...
...depth, work out under the cavern where the new rock has fallen, and begin hauling out stone, which is then hoisted onto ore carts for the long trip to the mine head. There it is pulverized, milled down as fine as flour, and the gold is chemically extracted as minute particles of dust...
Burns, 36, and Aberle, 27, are one-half of a four-man contract mining team. It will take them nearly a month to produce the 2,000 tons of ore needed to yield one 401-oz. bar that is "four nines," or 99.99% pure gold. But they will never see any of it. Even so, says fellow Miner Dan Cooper, a big Dakota farm boy lately turned miner: "People back home are always asking, 'How much did you get?' They think you just pick the stuff up and put it in your pocket...
...Gold! It has again become the stuff of greedy legend. Once coveted by kings as a gift from the gods, guarded by dragons, bloodily pursued by conquistadors and hapless Forty-Niners, it is sought today as the world's safest and most dramatically rewarding investment in what seems to be a steadily sinking world economy...
...soaring price (once $400 per oz. seemed beyond belief) has sent squadrons of amateur hunters backpacking into the hills to pan for gold. Some of the great old names-virtual ghost towns since the price was pegged at $35 per oz. in 1934-are bustling with new business. Cripple Creek in Colorado, Sierra City in California and Virginia City in Nevada, home of the Comstock Lode, are opening or planning to reopen mines, reworking old tailings with fancy new equipment, moving tons of rock to get at ore seams that for years were thought uneconomical to mine...