Want a turn-key mining opportunity? Check this out.

Marble Canyon—800 acres of unusual patterns and colors of marble inventory—plus a well thought out marketing plan along with the web sites (Marble-Boutique.com, BoutiqueMarble.com, MarbleBoutique.net) to sell it. All can be purchased for a no haggle $150,000 USD firm.

Welcome to the dichotomy of the Information Age being used to sell a Stone Age consumer item. Marble. Even though the Alaska gold prospectors, and a noted “silver” geologist that staked the claims know that gold mining claims assaying $20 per ton before processing are often called ‘mines,’ the Associated Group hereafter, legally, called the Partners, understand that getting $200 per ton for marble rubble to grind into a powder (10¢ per pound) is really a by-product of something that is quarried.

The huge difference is in quantity. Gold mining companies love to brag about their proven reserves. “A whole mountain,” comes to mind! Chief Geologist Lee Armstrong, for “the big name” drilling company, E.G. Longyear, who also had worked as a mineral consultant for the Chase Manhattan Bank, said of Marble Canyon, Nevada, that: “Reserves are doubtless very large, perhaps of the order of a few million tons, or more.” His advice to prospector Barry Murray, on looking at the exposed canyon walls was, “Save drill money on things that count, as developing patterns and colors.” In other words, think small, and get busy.

Murray was also advised by Dr. Armstrong to forget documenting reserves of the softer (just over a Mohs 3) recrystallized pure white “indoor” limestone, competing with the competions harder “outdoor” dolomitic white marble, resistant to smog, best used in skyscapers in large cities.

That was, of course, not to exclude the coarsely crystalline, translucence qualities of the Marble Canyon soft white that work so well to non-traditional uses of marble manufactured into a split-face ( 2” x 5” a half inch thick) bricks showing off an exciting natural cleavage that could be hand glued by a handy homeowner to cover over the then popular trend of faux wood panels in living rooms.

This recommendation, being very outside the traditional geologist’s expertise of — “Is it physically there, or not?”— stuck in Murray’s mind, especially when pulling out photographs years later of the samples he had collected for analysis by the University of Nevada, Mackay School of Mines. Excerpts of his June 1970 report covering three months of prospecting and mapping (by dragging a starting point three miles with transit and stadia rod, on horseback, from the only brass cap in the area) are included in this PDF.

A search of the records confirmed that one of Murray’s claim groups (a pure calcium carbonate marble) had indeed, as he had been informed, been swallowed up by the Great Basin National Park. The surprise was that while the unimportant (from an economic sense) had been lost to a BLM Wilderness designation, joining the USFS roadless Mount Moriah Wilderness —the best part of the main north canyon was wide open!

A few days later, thanks to new Nevada claim regulations, GPS systems, and legal subdivision staking, the mineral rights to the canyon are now controlled by “the Partner Group.”

For those not familiar with the last of the frontier laws as the mining act of 1872, and the Homestead and Taylor grazing act, the right to try and make a living on public lands are subject to payment of rental fees that keep escalating. Filing of the Partner Association Location Certificates, and map, with both the county, and the BLM was not free. They cost over $2,000 for the first year, not counting staking expenses. Making sure the discovery was legal —then and now— took 2,000 man hours.

If we speak of climatic change this should be a happy place to note that marble was used in wealthy tropical, homes before air-conditioning, for it’s coolness. It also has a “green-ness” of not having a high carbon count.

The Marble Canyon Partner Claims “partners,” —physical or financial— were actually looking for a long term commitment of developing yet another property. An old-fashioned miners handshake agreement between them was that whatever the Associates staked would be sold, or at least, joint ventured to those who understand that hard work is the old-fashioned way to create wealth.

The only paradigm shift needed to understand here is that industrial mineral products usually have many times the value per ton of ‘bank-run’ placer gold properties. The material is easier to handle. The ROI is greater.
What is needed to document here is age-old industrial age property evaluation formulas used to examine a mine:
A) What are the assays. What is the tenor of ore? What is the volume/tonnage, width x length x depth of material? (Proven, by published geologist’s reports.)

B) How many dollars will it take to process the mined material into a saleable product? This actually is more of a mining engineers’s call. (A half day’s research about the simple to use, “new,” diamond embedded wire saws, coming out of a marble producing China gives a valid hint of an answer.)

C) And more importantly, as even the U.S. Government no longer buys gold brought into assay offices, who would actually buy the mineral mined so all involved could make a profit for their effort? See Barry Murray’s URL www.Marble-Boutique.com virtual store suggestion — complete with a very real inventory of un-finished marble in ‘natures’ warehouse of Eastern Nevada.

Obviously someone who understands the Internet’s popular “top down” end use value of artistic marble would have an advantage over the traditional academic still trying to figure his overburden angle of repose upon an old-fashioned slide rule, while endlessly searching for a wholesale marble dealer who wasn’t a front for some other quarry with millions of tons of white marble, themselves, in reserves. In other words, without marketing, it isn’t a mine.

Barry Murray, being a marketing person who at one time owned and operated an advertising agency with a quantitate track record of selling 10’s of millions of dollars worth of rock crushers, niche high-end exotic foreign travel, and “street of dreams” homes for developers, suggests that the quality of colors and patterns of marble are more important than vast quantities of, “yet another, abundant, urinal white”—unless it is suitable for split-face production. Hence the marketing plan that would use the included web site domains to sell rare marble patterns and colors via the Internet.

Partner Roberta Dickerson —the gentle tempered one of the group— is looking forward to turning over the claims to one of hundreds of readers of her www.WesternMiner.com online magazine that have written, asking for, “Any sort of mining property where a small company of friends could band together to finance bootstrap production, that through hard work, and salesmanship, could develop something of real value.” Roberta is an Internet search engine guru, who controls 45,000 unique eyeballs per month from all her inter-linked mining web sites. (See the links page on this site) of a demographic of investors looking for opportunities in the mining business. This leads her to an understanding of how people looking for unusual marble for their home or office project can find Marble Canyon inventory of boutique marble online. The addition of the 3 web sites: www.Marble-Boutique.com, www.BoutiqueMarble.com www.MarbleBoutique.net gives the power of inter-linking to the marketing plan. A potential direction for marketing the unusual marbles of Marble Canyon can be seen at the www.Marble-Boutique.com web site.

Partner Ron Anderson explains that economic mining practice would have heavy “ore” being lowered, whenever possible, rather than raised through waste of overburden.
1) The ideal way to produce marble blocks —and perhaps slabs in-place— is a wire saw. As international patents expired, the Chinese perfected using diamond cutting technology into easily portable units that used a track system to keep tensions correct. Our system of choice is produced by www.WireSawMachine.com, who also sells a drill system that works well with established wire-saw principles of producing more than one face cut at a time.
For background on this,
see:http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/dp_stone/article/0,,DIY_13792_3846000,00.html.

2) Replacing up to 3-miles of traditional tensioned wire in Italian quarries, with shorter, faster, better, cheaper diamond wire, may make it very possible to do the custom cuts Murray is asking for to sell marble by qualities far beyond color — as Barry’s pattern of “Mustang Mane.”

Murray suggests that the Mustang Mane patterned ‘natural’ block shown in his video See www.Dimensional-Sone.net (that apparently came from the water eroded cliff face of a bed that continues for a traceable mile) if wire sawn, in place, would at least have a retail equivalent of the rough-edged 1 x 1/4 inch thick slab of granite setting outside a Home Depot at Lake Havasu, Arizona, with price tag of, “starting at $53 per square foot.” Of course Murray doesn’t have the training to compute —including wastage— that this single “virtual” marble block, shown to that geologist, even using the lessor worth for granite, may in reality have a retail value of $38,000.

The Partners involvement really was only to have fun, so for a limited time they are willing to sell, or joint venture, direct through nonnegotiable, bona fide one-time offers, that will either be accepted, or rejected.

From the non-production point of view it should be said that the working partners on the “Anderson side,” favor — through financiers Neil and Ellen Long’s connections in London— a non-taxable corporation to corporation, stock for stock transfer.
However, at 72-years of age, I too wish we could find the right individuals to buy at least some (if not all) of the partner’s out (me too) of a, “Now, what have you got us into Ollie, situation.”

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