Remember that old Humphrey Bogart film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? There’s something in the story that Emmett O’Connell tells about Great Western Mining Corporation’s Cabin Rock gold, silver, and uranium prospect that puts one in mind of the world of the old prospectors so vividly depicted by a grizzled and increasingly crazed Bogart in that great film. Situated high up in the Sierra Nevada, near the ghost town of Marietta, in Mineral County Nevada, the slopes of Cabin Rock are littered with the burial cairns of miners from former generations who never made it back off their claims. Not that they knew it then, because in their minds they were mining a long-established quartz vein for gold and silver, but the key life-and-death question facing them was: is Cabin Rock, or isn’t it, uranium country?

Well it is now, and for a brief while in the 1950s, when the US was looking for strategic uranium reserves to bolster its Cold War effort, it was too. But before and after that Cold War push awareness of the uranium content of the area was limited, and after the Cold War push knowledge of the uranium prospectivity of the area lay buried deep in the vaults of some government department or other. The bodycount is so high on the slopes of Cabin Rock, at least according to Mr O’Connell’s theory, because the miners were blasting through uranium-bearing rock to get at the gold and silver, totally unaware that they were creating a deadly dust with every blast.

It’s been a long journey for Cabin Rock. When Mr O’Connell first picked up the property back in the 1980s, he himself was unaware of the uranium content of the ground. He’d worked the area in the 1970s, when he came into contact with Don Bracken, who held the license over Cabin Rock, living what he calls “a hermit like existence in the mountains with an Alsatian dog”. Mr Bracken subsequently died, leaving Mr O’Connell a claims map over some claims that had only recently expired. But the gold price was in the doldrums, so after an initial investigation, in which Mr O’Connell says it took four attempts to even find the claims site, he put the project on the shelf andwent off to concentrate on the oil business.

It’s only comparatively recently that Cabin Rock has been dusted off, under the auspices of Great Western Mining, but almost as soon as it was, says Mr O’Connell, “we realized we were onto a radioactive anomaly”. That lead the company to do some digging, and they turned up the 1950s investigation into the uranium potential of the property. The 1950s results showed grades as high as 0.66 per cent U308, and subsequent investigations by Great Western have delivered grades almost as good. The best from last year’s sampling was 0.564 per cent U308, but several samples showed higher than 0.2 per cent. Meanwhile on the adjoining quartz vein the company has just delivered some decent looking grades too, including one exceptional - though not representative – sample that showed 68 grams per ton gold and nearly 4,700 grams per ton silver.

So the company has gone just about as far as it can on its Plus listing, and depending on the results of a Competent Person’s Report that’s currently underway, is likely to move to Aim in the summer. As Mr O’Connell says, “At some point you have to cast your bread onto the water to see if it floats”. Any move to Aim will probably be accompanied by a fundraising, although Mr O’Connell does emphasize that for the really big cash outlay that will likely be required down the line the company will do a joint venture. Cabin Rock is 80 miles from the nearest habitation, and two miles from the nearest water source, so although planning and permitting isn’t likely to be a serious obstacle, there are plenty of logistical problems to get to grips with. The world has moved on since the times of Bogart’s madness in Sierra Madre, but in some ways not by much.