Stretching up a hillside, over a crest and down the other side, a picket line of plastic sewer pipes stands vigil over a tantalizing idea:
Gold in the South Hills.More than 650 claims have been filed in the past three years in the South Hills, said Don Oman, a Sawtooth National Forest official.
Atlas Precious Metals of Grand Junction, Colo., has filed more than 50 claims in the Magpie Basin on the banks of Rock Creek. The company's markers, four-inch white plastic pipes about three feet high, set upright in the ground, stake out Atlas' claim to an entire hill.
Whatever minerals lie below ground, if found in economic quantities, belong to Atlas.
Whether the white pipes are the early signs of a local gold rush is still a matter of speculation.
The South Hills are similar to formations near Elko, Nev., the site of recent large gold finds that have sent that community into a lucrative boom. The rocks are the same geological age and part of the general Western basin and range structure.
"But they are not the same rocks," cautioned Joe Scheuering, project manager for a proposed mining operation in the Black Pine area of the South Hills by the Noranda Mining Co., of Toronto.
Leigh Hawkins of Burley had a claim in that area, but it lapsed because he and his partner did not report the required $100 worth of work a year on the claim. Their recent attempt to sell the claim was unsuccesful.
He said one assay report cited gold in a concentration of about 0.03 ounce per ton of ore. That means it would take about 33 tons of ore to yield one ounce of gold.
Larry Dee, geologist with the Bureau of Land Management, which administers mining claims on public land, said a 0.03 concentration is significant. Mines in Nevada are extracting concentrations as low as .0.01 ounce per ton, he said.
"I thought there would have been a gold rush in south Idaho by now," Hawkins said. "I say that there's good mineral in Idaho."
Hawkins attributes the slowdown of mining in southern Idaho to a recent drop in gold prices. Gold was listed recently at $376 an ounce.
Some reports of gold from the South Hills, however, may have been exaggerated, Dee said. Some prospectors can't read assay report numbers very well and mistake an insignificant amount of gold for a valuable find, he said.
"You can assay a horse teat and come up with traces of gold," he said.
Most gold in small concentrations, known as micro deposits, is extracted by leaching the precious metal from the ore rock with a weak cyanide solution. That's the process being used by Noranda and by mining companies around Elko.
Micro deposits often are the result of ancient hot mineral waters rising up from the depths. The waters dissolve minerals on their way up and deposit those minerals on rocks near the surface.
The history of ancient hot springs in the South Hills is uncertain, Dee said. But "the fact that several big companies have been looking at it must mean something," he said.
In addition to Atlas, American Copper Nickel, United Silver Mines and a long list of individuals have done some exploration in the area, according to BLM records.
Atlas, the biggest operator in the Twin Falls Ranger District, is not saying anything about its intentions in the South Hills. Company officials deferred comments on their South Hills claims to a New York City publicity firm. A spokesman said the claims were exploratory claims, and the company has no immediate plans to start mining here.
The company owns the rights to about 1.2 million ounces of gold at Grassy Mountain in eastern Oregon. Together with other holdings, the company has about 2.7 million ounces of gold in proven deposits.
Anyone can file a mining claim on public land, Oman said. All that's required is a legal description of the site, reference points and some evidence that valuable minerals exist in the claim.