Hi @ad0, they'll need to be extremely lucky to find any remaining high-grade surface gold at Adelong that turns out to be indicative of below-ground high-grade veins/reef's located within the designated mining lease zone ML1435 (which is a small area). The accessible near-surface high-grade gold within ML1435 was pretty much mined-out in the 1850's - early 1900's. Drilling results over the past 40 years indicates there's not much near-surface stuff left in ML1435.
Very little deep drilling (i.e. 250m or deeper) has occurred within ML1435, so perhaps there's potential for something spectacular that would require deep underground mining for extraction (but would also be a lot more expensive than the open pit mining they're proposing for extracting the residual near-surface low-grade patchy stuff that's left over from the 1850's - early 1900's mining period).
