'Flurry' sparked by gold prices revitalizes Eureka, Nev.

EUREKA, Nev. — The gold at the Ruby Hill Mine is microscopic, specks of specks that amount to a few ounces in every 100 tons of rock carved from the earth. It is embedded hundreds of feet beneath the rocky floor of the high desert, tawny and stubbled with sagebrush, toothy ridges dusted with snow.

In staggered, 10-hour shifts, P.J. Whelchel removes buckets of blasted rock 40 tons at a time, making 100 passes an hour with his diesel-powered loader. He and the other miners will have to dig around the clock for about a year just to remove the 600-foot-deep layer of clay covering the gold.

"I've never seen a nugget myself," said Whelchel. "Maybe one of these days."

But it is unlikely that this 21st-century gold miner ever will.

The visible gold in North America, for the most part, has already been found. What remains are almost literally molecules of gold, buried deep in the earth.

Whelchel would not be employed here, nor the mine still open, had the price of gold not recently climbed to a 20-year high. Now priced at about $550 per troy ounce, even microns of gold are worth the high cost of extraction.

Costly expeditions in Russia, Africa and South America are being funded in hopes of uncovering the next great deposit. And in Nevada — if the state was a country, it would be the third largest gold-producing nation in the world — small mines are being reopened, or kept open.

A gold rush? Perhaps not. But after decades of depressed prices, it qualifies as a gold flurry, and the effects are clear in places like Eureka, isolated even by Nevada standards.

Because of gold, sales tax revenues in Eureka County have nearly doubled. Housing is filled to capacity. Property values are at an all-time high. The high school is getting an addition.

There are less obvious changes, too. Eateries are full at lunch time, school enrollment is up and the school's eight-man football team went to the state championship last year.

"There's been more activity in this end of the county in last six to eight months than there's been in the last eight to 10 years," said Ron Carrion, owner of the Owl Club.

Perched at an elevation of 6,500 feet, Eureka is a hilly dot of a town, treeless except for man-high shrubs of cedar. The roads are little traveled, the people scattered widely.