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Mining Claims
HISTORY OF THE DEER TRAIL CLAIMS
Effective June 1, 1992, UNICO, Inc., entered into a ten-year "Mining
Lease option to Purchase," with Deer Trail Development Corporation, Dallas,
Texas. {now Crown Mines, LLC} 27 patented claims (505 acres), 6 patented mill
sites (30 acres), and 137 un-patented claims (2,740 acres), located in the Deer
Trail Mountain-Alunite Ridge mining area in the Marysvale volcanic field of west-central
Utah, near Marysvale, Utah, about 165 miles south-southwest of Salt Lake City.
On Nov. 26, 2001, UNICO Inc. announced the completion of a new 30 month lease
agreement with Crown Mines of Dallas, Texas, for the continued operation of the
Deer Trail Mine in Marysvale, Utah. Under the new lease, beginning December 1,
2001, UNICO may operate the Deer Trail Mine until May 29, 2004. At any point during
the lease, UNICO may purchase the Deer Trail Mine for $4,000,000 and pay Crown
Mines a 3% net smelter royalty.
These "Deer Trail Claims" total 3,275 acres, or 5.12 square miles,
and include workings known as the Deer Trail Mine, the PTH Tunnel and the Carisa
and Lucky Boy Mines. The PTH Tunnel penetrates more than 10,000 feet, with a developed
network of tunnels, shafts, stopes, and raises at the 3,400-foot-area and at the
8,000-foot-area, and was mined by prior owners for gold and silver. The timbered
and ventilated tunnels include more than two miles of track for ore cars accessed
through a covered entrance structure. On-site are ore cars, battery operated engines,
an engine storage and charging house, an electric power substation, a miners'
locker room, a compressor building, and a general office, lab, core-sampling and
housing facility. Both rail terminals and roadways are easily accessed year around
and water is accessible to the site.
The initial Deer Trail claim dates to 1870, and mining activity was almost
continuous from the turn-of-the-century to 1981. By as early as about 1911, an
estimated $17 million in ore had been hauled from the mine at a time when gold
was only $20 an ounce. Companies such as Arundel Mining (the mining instrument
of a member of the du Pont family), Phelps Dodge, Marysvale Mining and Noranda
have done work there. Arundel, for example, explored at the 3,300-foot-point of
the PTH Tunnel and subsequently drove it forward beyond the 10,000-foot-mark.
Ore occurrences at the 3,300- and 4,300-foot-areas presaged a significant mining
operation in the 8,000-foot-area. Arundel shipped several million dollars of ore
containing gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper and cadmium. All such mining operations
were ceased in 1981 due to lack of mill and smelter recipients.
Phelps Dodge, and later Noranda, believed the Deer Trail/PTH geology was indicative
of a major ore occurrence of molybdenum and copper. For several years, in excess
of $250,000 per year was budgeted by them for further exploration and drilling.
The available structural and mineralogical data suggest, according to the
United States Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey Open-file Report
78-314, that the Deer Trail mountain-Alunite Ridge mining area is centered above
a 14-million-year-old epizonal stock that caused the local doming of this area.
During emplacement, a dome with a radical fracture pattern formed and, with continued
movement, the south side of the dome was uplifted as a trap door. A highly acidic
wet-stream environment developed above the stock and the fractures were filled
with vein-type alunite; the adjacent rocks were replaced by mixtures of alunite
and kaolinite. Economic mineral deposits are also zoned around a barren, sulfate-dominated
core at Alunite Ridge, surrounded by a doughnut-shaped ring of epithermal base-
and precious-metal veins, and finally by base- and precious-metal mantos containing
some uranium. |
