America's Overlooked Gold Belt Is About to Change Everything

America's Overlooked Gold Belt Is About to Change Everything In 2005 the U.S. government closed 308,600 acres of Nevada to new mining claims. It needed the ground for a railroad to carry the nation's nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. The railroad was never built. And the land it had been holding turned out to sit on top of what may be the largest new gold discovery made in the United States in a generation — around 20 million ounces, in a district almost nobody outside the mining industry has heard of. This is the story of the Beatty district in southern Nevada: how a two-person prospect generator found it on satellite imagery, staked it in February 2014, and then discovered via title search that they'd claimed ground inside a federal withdrawal. How a property with no visible gold at surface was nearly impossible to sell. How AngloGold Ashanti optioned it in 2017 and became the first company willing to drill it. And how, in a single year, two separate one-percent royalty slices on the same deposit changed hands for more than half a billion dollars — before anyone had mined an ounce.