The Carlin Trend: Invisible Gold

In the spring of nineteen sixty-one, a geologist named John Livermore working for the Newmont Mining Corporation came to the hills near the small ranching town of Carlin, about twenty-three miles west of Elko, following a theory about invisible gold. The theory had been worked out by a United States Geological Survey scientist named Ralph Roberts, who believed that certain geological fault zones in north-central Nevada might have channeled gold-bearing fluids into sedimentary rocks in concentrations too small to see but large enough to matter.

Livermore and a colleague staked their first claims in October of that year. By nineteen sixty-five, the Carlin Mine was in operation, the first primary open-pit gold mine in the United States designed to extract gold that could not be seen with the naked eye. The process worked by crushing enormous volumes of rock and treating it with a solution that dissolves the microscopic gold particles out of the ore. The mine's early output was modest, with cumulative production of only about twenty-two thousand ounces in its first years, a small fraction of what later expansion would recover.

What followed was the realization that the Carlin gold was not a single deposit but the surface expression of a geological trend running roughly forty miles through the mountains and valleys north and west of Elko. The Carlin Trend, as geologists named it, has produced more than fifty million ounces of gold and transformed Nevada into the largest gold-producing state in the country. The mines are vast open pits, the trucks that work them are the size of buildings, and the gold they produce is entirely invisible until chemistry concentrates it. This is what the modern gold rush looks like.