Tens of millions of tourists visit Las Vegas each year, spending billions of dollars in the city's casinos, entertainment venues, and attractions. Yet my move brought me to Reno, a seven-hour drive from the desert of Las Vegas. Although Reno still has its fair share of casinos, the city feels like a world apart.
But after decades of outsourcing tungsten production, the federal government has now begun restricting imports. United States Tungsten founders Stacy Hastie and Randy Waterfield saw this coming. They're reviving what was once America's largest tungsten mine, the Tungsten Queen. It's a site holding an estimated 1 million tons of tungsten with an in-ground value approaching $450 million, the company says. And it says it is already in talks with the U.S. Government.
After a mine cave-in revealed a rich vein of ore Bodie, California became a thriving town during the years of the California gold rush. It quickly exploded in size and at its pinnacle was home to around had around 2,000 structures and a population of 8,000 people. It went bust in 1881 and what buildings remain standing represents about 10% of its original structures.
Author Jules Verne briefly mentioned the tiny railroad town tucked into the Sierra Nevada foothills in his classic "Around the World in 80 Days." The plot takes protagonists Phileas Fogg, a wealthy and bored Londoner, and his French sidekick, Passepartout, on a whirlwind global journey at the height of the Industrial Age. "The train, on leaving Sacramento, and passing the junction, Roclin, Auburn, and Colfax, entered the range of the Sierra Nevada," Verne wrote in 1872 of the Transcontinental Railroad leg of the journey.
Now, in a recent study published in Geology, retired University of New Mexico geologist Karl Karlstrom and his colleagues conclude that the asteroid's impact shook Marble Canyon hard enough to dislodge great chunks of stone and send a landslide tumbling into the river. The debris formed a natural dam that backed up the Colorado for over 50 miles to near present-day Lees Ferry.
With the price of a single ounce of gold now currently hovering around $4,700 (right around its all-time high), the question of course is whether it's too late for investors to dive in. I'm of the view that this momentum rally is probably warranted. That's in part due to the underlying fundamentals of gold and its overall market capitalization relative to stocks (which is still low, despite its recent rally).
