WSJ 20140130 Good News and Bad
The Wallace Street Journal
Wallace, Idaho – January brought mixed news to our beleaguered mining camp here in the (finally) snowy Coeur d'Alenes.
The party ended for United Silver Corp., 80 percent owner of the Crescent silver mine located between the Sunshine and Bunker Hill, on the 9th of this month, when USC announced the appointment of an Ontario court-ordered receiver for the Vancouver-based company and resignations of the then-current board of directors.
This followed demand for full payment of a secured loan by creditor HUSC, LLC, back in July 2013 – although the handwriting on the wall probably first appeared on July 9, 2012, when Jim Meek, one of five members of Sterling Mining Co.'s circular firing squad, joined United Silver's board.
At any rate, the Crescent is BK; the Sunshine Mine ended up in the hands of New York investor Tom Kaplan after lease-holder Sterling's bankruptcy in 2009, and nobody involved with either mine is saying much of anything. Nevertheless a drive-by at Sunshine will disclose the presence of several dozen vehicles with their windshields scraped of ice and snow – so something's going on there. Late last year Kaplan also acquired the Sunshine Silver Refinery, originally owned by Sunshine but sold to Idaho cobalt miner Formation Capital a half-decade ago.
Moving a tad east, the question on everyone's mind is, whither heads the Galena-Coeur complex, owned (as last we've heard) by U.S. Silver & Gold Corp. (USA.TO), which also owns an inactive mud-mine in Montana. However, the company is optimistic that its downsized mining efforts at the Galena will unearth between 2.2 and 2.4 million ounces of silver this year, an 8 percent boost over the 2.12 million ounces it dug out in 2013.
Regardless, hope springs eternal: USA's website proclaims a target of 5 million ounces of silver a year by the end of 2015 from Galena and Coeur.
At either extremity of the camp are Bunker Hill to the west and Hecla to the east. Bunker Hill, once the biggest operation in the district, is in the hands of four partners, one of which is the family of the late Robert Hopper, whose singular struggle to keep the mine alive and out of the grasping clutches of the Environmental Protection Agency's lawyer-cum-thieves, is the stuff of legend.
Family members tell us it's their desire to see the Bunker Hill mine returned to production and there are plenty of economic geological assessments dating back to the 1960s and 1970s that make a powerful case for doing so. Other factions would seem to prefer to scrap what's left of the infrastructure supporting this massive deposit, despite perhaps another century's worth of resources lurking within.
Doubtless the best dose of news comes from Hecla, which owns a 20-square-mile land position in, around and including the Lucky Friday, Star and Tamarack mines. The Lucky Friday resumed full production late last year following a 14-month shutdown for shaft repair. Hecla gives guidance of 3 million ounces from the 'Friday in 2014 at a cash cost net of base metal credits to the tune of $9 an ounce.
Hecla's Greens Creek mine on Admiralty Island in Alaska will serve up the lion's share of silver in 2014, between 6.5 and 7.0 million ounces, along with 55,000 ounces of gold, at a cash cost of $6 per silver-equivalent ounce, while their newly acquired Casa Berardi mine in the Val d'Or District of Quebec is on track for 125,000 oz. of gold this year.
That's the score, and the Big Dogs in our little part of the world are Hecla and Mr. Kaplan's privately-held Electrum Group.
What they intend to do about idle properties around and between them, stretching from Pine Creek to the Montana border, could make for interesting drama this year and next. It would behoove the working stiffs in this camp, whether they don diggers or neckties in the morning, to pay careful attention as well.
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