Stalled gold mine in Searchlight selling off equipment

The Coyote has gone quiet once again in Searchlight.

Just a few years after it reopened, the gold mine some expected to breathe new life into Harry Reid’s hometown 60 miles south of Las Vegas is selling off its equipment as it prepares to go dormant.

There will be an auction Friday at the Coyote Gold Mine, and almost everything is on the block, from the rock crusher and underground mine loaders to the office furniture.

“They’re getting rid of most of their equipment and keeping the mine, keeping the mining rights,” said Josh Seidel, an auctioneer for Bar None, the California company handling the sale.

More than 80 prospective buyers, including some from Canada and Mexico, had registered for the auction as of Tuesday. “We’ve got guys who are going to be bidding from all over the world,” Seidel said.

The big ticket item is a 2012 rock crushing system, which is expected to fetch $450,000 to $650,000. Seidel said the mine bought the machine a few years ago for more than $900,000.

“It’s damned near brand new,” he gushed.

Reached by phone, an employee at the mine said he couldn’t talk about the auction. He referred questions to the mine’s owners, who were not available for comment.

A small private company called Nevada Mining & Milling LLC bought the mine in 2012 for a reported price of $3.25 million. Two years later, the company made headlines when it paid the then-Senate majority leader $1.75 million for eight mining claims, 110 acres and Reid’s house in Searchlight.

According to state permit documents, the company was granted approval in 2012 to rehab two of the mine’s underground shafts and double its ore processing rate to 36,499 tons a year.

The Coyote Mine was first permitted to operate in 1995, but activity there was “minimal,” state records show.

The mine just off U.S. Highway 95 at the northern edge of Searchlight has never reported any gold production to the state, although “that does not preclude unreported production of gold,” said John Muntean, research economic geologist for the University of Nevada, Reno’s Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology.

“Such unreported production would likely be very minor,” Muntean said in an email.

Gold and silver mining in Searchlight dates to the 1890s, but the activity was short lived and production modest by Nevada standards.

Unlike the vast deposits of diffused microscopic gold along Northern Nevada’s Carlin Trend, what gold there is to be found around Searchlight mostly hides inside narrow veins of quartz, said Bill Durbin, chief of Southern Nevada operations for the Nevada Minerals Division.

“And (those veins) need to be wide enough and rich enough to pay off,” he said.

But Durbin stopped short of calling what’s happening at the Coyote Mine the end of the era. Mining in Southern Nevada has always been “a rock-and-roll roller-coaster ride,” he said, and some future spike in gold prices or advance in extraction technology could easily spark new activity in the area.

“You never know,” Durbin said. “These old mining districts are often targets for new exploration.”

A complete list of the items up for sale at the Coyote Mine is available online at www.barnoneauction.com.

Prospective buyers can inspect the merchandise in person from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday. A preview also will be available at the mine from 7 a.m. Friday until the bidding starts at 10 a.m.

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Find him on Twitter: @RefriedBrean