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Ralph Erquiaga hit his 40th anniversary as an employee at the Marigold Mine south of Valmy. He was the mine’s process manager but is now the capital projects manager for the mine, which has 450 employees.
Mike Anderson Sr., a lab technician in the process division at SSR Mining’s Marigold Mine south of Valmy holds a bar of recently poured gold next to the hot gold bucket in the refinery in this spring 2022 photograph.
Jim Carver, manager of resource development for SSR Mining’s Marigold Mine in Pershing County looks at a core sample this spring at an exploration site, with a drill rig in the background.
A 320-ton Komatsu haul truck travels on a haul road at SSR Mining’s Marigold Mine in Humboldt County as another haul truck heads the other way one day this spring. Marigold has 25 haul trucks in its mining fleet.
Gold is poured into bars in the refinery at SSR Mining’s Marigold Mine in early May. The processing facilities are roughly three miles south of Interstate 80 at Valmy, although mining operations are spread out over several open pits.
A P&H electric shovel prepares to drop a load of material into the bed of a waiting haul truck at an open pit at SSR Mining’s Marigold Mine. This is the mine’s only electric shovel, but the mine also has four hydraulic shovels in operation.
With all the mining plans and exploration projects at SSR Mining Inc.’s Marigold Mine that has been in production in Nevada since 1989, the mine’s general manager, Don Dwyer, said he saw “no reason we wouldn’t be here another 30 years.”
Marigold’s facilities are three miles south of Interstate 80 at Valmy, and current mining operations are in that vicinity, but Marigold properties include Trenton Canyon and Buffalo Valley, where exploration is underway or planned for potential future mining.
SSR Mining is planning to spend $24 million on exploration at Marigold this year.
“We secured the drill rigs earlier in the year,” Dwyer said.
Plans also call for starting engineering studies back up at Trenton Canyon to “basically help us understand what would be the size of the pits,” as well as where any heap leach pads, or a new waste rock dump would go and from there figure out how operations at Trenton Canyon would add to life of mine and start the permitting process, he said.
Newmont Corp. mined Trenton Canyon years ago, and there is an old building on site that houses the North Peak carbon columns and an office trailer, but Dwyer doubted they would be used in new operations. Newmont permitting could ease new permitting efforts for Trenton Canyon, he also said.
“We’re likely to build a new heap leach facility at Trenton Canyon and carbon columns and bring the carbon back to Marigold, which is about a 25-minute trip,” Dwyer said.
Buffalo Valley is another 20 minutes south of Trenton Canyon so that would be an even longer trip back to Marigold. Buffalo Valley has a small open pit from long-past production.
Stewart Beckman, executive vice president and chief operating officer for SSR Mining, said in the company’s first-quarter earnings call that “we are getting new drilling at Buffalo Valley that we’re pretty excited about and also at Trenton Canyon that is a little bit different than we had thought before ….”
Exploration drilling at Trenton Canyon includes looking at deep sulfide ores, “but the majority of what we are drilling is oxide ore we can heap leach currently,” Dwyer said.
Marigold mine’s life span now is to 2032, but that doesn’t cover the potential at Trenton Canyon and Buffalo Valley, as well as possibilities at the current mine site, where current mining is in the Mackay Complex.
Dwyer said the mining is ongoing within the complex at Mackay 4, at 5 North 2 and at H1 in the northern part of the pit, and all the ore is trucked to a heap leach pad without going through a crusher or going to a mill.
“We basically blast it, and it goes run-of-mine to the heap leach pad,” he said, and ore from the pads later goes to carbon columns, and the gold from there goes through an electrowinning circuit, the retort system and then to the smelter to be poured into gold bars.
At the leach pads, Marigold completed construction of cell 19B and is “currently stacking ore on that cell, and this year we will be starting construction on cell 23A,” Dwyer said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Winnemucca office is in the middle of an environmental assessment for the Valmy Expansion, which covers a series of older pits that Marigold is looking to expand. These include the Mud, Valley and New Millennium pits. New Millennium itself was an expansion of the older Antler and Basalt pits.
“We will start in the Mud Pit in 2025, and the other ones will come later in the mine life,” Dwyer said, reporting that there is exploration to expand New Millennium and add to Marigold’s mine life.
According to Denver-based SSR Mining’s earnings report, Marigold produced 33,788 ounces of gold in the first quarter, down from 67,936 ounces in the first quarter of 2021 as a result of mine scheduling and an increase in the heap leach inventory that delayed some gold production into the second quarter.
The heap leach inventory increased due to the timing of ore placements on the leach pads and slower leaching rates of finer ore from the north pits, the report stated.
SSR Mining also said that Marigold remains on track for production guidance of 215,000 to 245,000 ounces of gold in 2022, with most of the production coming in the second half. Beckman said the fourth quarter will be the best when higher grades are processed.
Dwyer said that “we are going to be mining higher grades out of the H1 pit.”
All-in sustaining costs for Marigold averaged $1,564 per ounce in the first quarter, compared with $1,195 in the 2021 quarter, but the company stated that the costs will improve in the second half of the year.
Marigold has 450 employees, and “the goal is to get up to a little more than 460,” Dwyer said, adding that two-thirds of the employees come from Winnemucca and the others from Battle Mountain, and many are long-term employees.
Ralph Erquiga marked his 40th anniversary at Marigold this year. He was the process manager but transitioned to be the capital projects manager.
“You don’t find that often that people stay with a company that long,” Dwyer said.
“Overall, at Marigold we really try to consider the people and the culture, and our turnover rate is less than our peers because we focus on the people,” he said.
Marigold’s fleet includes 25 haul trucks that are 320-ton Hitachi and Komatsu brands, one P&H electric shovel that handles about two-thirds of the mining, and four hydraulic shovels. Dwyer said Marigold is slowly replacing the Hitachi shovels with new Komatsu shovels.
Over the years, reclamation has included backfilling pits, and Marigold is currently backfilling the Mackay 3 pit and the 5 North 1 pit.
Marigold also is dewatering for the first time in all its years of operation, with four active wells and three more wells coming. The current dewatering rate is under 2,000 gallons per minute, and Marigold will be constructing rapid infiltration basins this year, Dwyer said.
Currently, water is discharged into Cottonwood Creek under a temporary discharge permit.
Dwyer said the dewatering “allows us to access ores deeper in the Mackay pits, in the Red Dot area on the west side.”
The BLM issued a record of decision in October 2019 allowing dewatering of up to 10,718 gallons per minute.
Marigold also has continued to work on improving safety at the mine since a double fatality in 2017 that were the first for the mine, and Dwyer said there has been a downturn in the number of injuries. In fact, the Nevada Mining Association honored Marigold with eight individual safety awards last year, the most of any mining company in the association, he said.
The Mackay Complex is named for the Mackay School of Mines at the University of Nevada, Reno, and UNR is a major royalty holder in that area of Marigold Mine. The university receives a royalty from mining at Mackay.
SSR Mining, which was called Silver Standard Resources before it shortened its name to SSR Mining, bought 100% of Marigold in 2014, and the company merged with Alacer Gold Corp. in 2020. The company’s other operations include the Seabee underground mine in Canada, the Copler Mine in Turkey and the Puna silver mine in Argentina.
According to the technical report on Marigold prepared by OreWin and released in February, the first recorded gold production from Marigold was in 1938 from an underground mine, and roughly 9,000 tons of ore were processed before World War II halted production.
Several unsuccessful attempts were made to reopen and operate the mine before exploration activities resumed in 1968, the report states. From 1968 through 1985, several companies explored across the Marigold area, and in 1986 a joint venture was formed between a subsidiary of Santa Fe Pacific Railroad and the Cordex Group. They consolidated some of the land holdings.
A production decision was made in March 1988 on the 8S deposit, and in August 1989, the first gold dore’ bar was poured at the Marigold mill, the report states.
Rayrock Mines, the operating company for Cordex, purchased two-thirds ownership of Marigold in 1992, and Homestake Mining Co. held the remainder of the interest until Barrick Gold Corp. absorbed Homestake and then held the one-third ownership. 
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Ralph Erquiaga hit his 40th anniversary as an employee at the Marigold Mine south of Valmy. He was the mine’s process manager but is now the capital projects manager for the mine, which has 450 employees.
Mike Anderson Sr., a lab technician in the process division at SSR Mining’s Marigold Mine south of Valmy holds a bar of recently poured gold next to the hot gold bucket in the refinery in this spring 2022 photograph.
Jim Carver, manager of resource development for SSR Mining’s Marigold Mine in Pershing County looks at a core sample this spring at an exploration site, with a drill rig in the background.
A 320-ton Komatsu haul truck travels on a haul road at SSR Mining’s Marigold Mine in Humboldt County as another haul truck heads the other way one day this spring. Marigold has 25 haul trucks in its mining fleet.
Gold is poured into bars in the refinery at SSR Mining’s Marigold Mine in early May. The processing facilities are roughly three miles south of Interstate 80 at Valmy, although mining operations are spread out over several open pits.
A P&H electric shovel prepares to drop a load of material into the bed of a waiting haul truck at an open pit at SSR Mining’s Marigold Mine. This is the mine’s only electric shovel, but the mine also has four hydraulic shovels in operation.
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