The prices of silver and gold have exploded higher over the past year as the world economy has digested President Trump’s attempt to reshape world trade through tariffs, financial sanctions, and military intervention. Gold has almost doubled in price since January 2025, when it started at $2,717 an ounce and is now trading at $4,758 an ounce. Silver has also seen a massive rise in value, tripling from $31 an ounce in January 2025 to $93 an ounce on Monday. While these gigantic price moves over the past year might not seem to have an impact on the Wet Mountain Valley, one Canadian Company continues to eye the land just to the North of Westcliffe and Silver Cliff as a future site for a gold, silver, and copper mine.
Viscount Mining has been test drilling for the last decade in the historic silver mining area that brought the first towns to the region in the late 1870s. Specifically, it has been exploring the Passiflora area, named after the historic Herman-Passiflora Mine, with the first records of ore discovery dating back to 1895. The mine produced primarily silver and lead, but was unique in the region for its secondary copper and gold ores.
Viscount announced in December that its datasets showed a large gold-copper porphyry deposit on its mining claims and on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) property. According to the company, “Viscount recently obtained historical mine reports (1908-1968) from the Colorado State Archivist’s Office covering underground operations in the broader Hardscrabble Mining District surrounding the Company’s first deep drill hole (PF-03A), which intersected 843.9 meters of continuous copper-gold mineralization. Although incomplete, the records document multiple underground shipments grading approximately 10-15% lead and 5-15 oz/ton silver, with additional gold and zinc credits noted in several of the annual reports. These reports highlight the long-recognized polymetallic enrichment of the district and provide context for the broader mineralizing system that Passiflora is part of.”
What is of interest to Viscount is that the type of deposit, called a porphyry, is unique because while it is not often a mineralized deposit and considered low-grade, the density of the ore means it is often economic to mine at a large scale.
These deposits are created by magmatic hydrothermal fluids that precipitate metals from a large, cooling magma body deep underground. As the steam and water cool as they rise towards the surface, they form deposits in the cracks through which those fluids have pushed.
Viscount announced that it is “now finalizing drill collar locations for holes targeting both the USGS-mapped breccia pipes and the deeper core hole designed to test the strongest portion of the magnetic (MT) anomaly at Passiflora. The technical team is continuing to integrate soil geochemistry, structural mapping, and MT geophysical data into a refined 3D targeting model to optimize drill placement and maximize geological insight from the initial holes. The first drill hole of 2026 is designed to test the breccia pipes and continue through to the heart of the Quantec MT anomaly. This angled hole is anticipated to be about 1500M. Permitting activities are underway and progressing in line with expectations, keeping the Company on schedule to begin drilling in early 2026.”
The mention of breccia pipes near the Passiflora is key, as these geological features in the earth are often associated with high-grade gold or silver mineralization. The most obvious example is the breccia pipe formations in Cripple Creek, where a massive open-pit gold mine still operates.
Despite these prospects, any major mining operation is not going to take place in the near future. Viscount is a prospecting company that tries to prove deposits and sell those mineral rights to large mining operations. It is a highly speculative business model. Throughout the region’s modern history, deposits in the area were seldom profitable for the companies that paid for the mines in the late 1800s. Only one gold mine near the old town site of Querida to the east of Westcliffe, and the lead mine in Ilse Camp in far eastern Custer County, produced ore after the initial rush until the 1940s.
However, central banks around the world have realized that they can no longer fully trust holding United States Treasury Bonds as a store of wealth, as the President can sanction them. Instead, nations have turned back to using gold as a store of wealth for their reserves but still transact in dollars. While this historical shift is still in its infancy, it does likely mean that the price of gold, and to a lesser extent silver, will command higher prices for the rest of the decade.
– Jordan Hedberg
