Shedding light on local issues

Soledad Mountain rises above a sea of wind turbines in Mojave, seen from Oak Creek Road. The barren, rugged mountain harbors veins of gold and silver that individual miners and companies have dug for more than a century. With modern extraction techniques, the Golden Queen Mining Co. Ltd. will commence industrial-scale mining in 2015, providing 140 to 150 jobs. "The Next California Gold Producer," says the company's web site of its Soledad Mountain Project. "The project will use conventional open pit mining methods and the cyanide heap leach and Merrill-Crowe processes to recover gold and silver from crushed, agglomerated ore." Construction has started on site. The director and president is Canadian H. Lutz Klingmann, who has developed six mines and who has had operating experience in Africa, Venezuela and Canada in addition to the United States. Investor information and current stock prices ore on the web site. See http://goldenqueen.com.

For a fun and informative look at the history of the Soledad Mines read this great two part series by Susan Wiggins: http://www.theloopnewspaper.com/story/2014/01/18/community/soledad-mines-part-i/240.html