Chatter On Gold Mining Projects

One recurring comment at the Dahlman Rose Emerging Miners CEO Conference in New York last week, which brought leaders of precious metal companies together in a third-floor conference room at the Plaza Hotel in New York, was how much of the Dow Jones industrial average an ounce of gold could buy these days. Stocks don't seem like such a great buy to this crowd, unless they're gold mining stocks.

Talk swirled fast over the first coffee break about gold's continued, bumpy rise against stocks and the dollar. Robert McEwan, CEO of U.S. Gold ( UXG ), made his name in the last decade by bringing Goldcorp ( GG )'s stock performance up 30% by challenging people around the globe to tell him where the gold was buried in their Canadian site--a kind of geological crowd-sourcing that relied successfully on the enthusiasm of gold's adherents.

The U.S. is the largest market for the mining and the trading of gold, which is why McEwan started U.S. Gold ( UXG ) after divesting his Goldcorp shares in 2007, following an M&A dispute with Goldcorp's management. Physical gold remains the traditional standard for safe investing, and CEOs like McEwan practice what they preach.

"When the subprime market crashed in 2007, it was the first time I stopped and thought about where my money was," McEwen said.

Ron Thiessen, CEO of Hunter Dickinson Inc. and Northern Dynasty Minerals ( NAK ), who gave a talk, "Survived and Now Thriving in a Commodity Market," presented plans for the mining of what is said to be the largest gold deposit in the world, near Bristol Bay, Alaska. The Pebble Project, which is what it is being called, is projected to contain 94 million ounces of gold and 72 billion pounds of copper, making it the first- and sixth-largest deposit in the world, respectively, for those elements.

The questions at the conference, though, were about the land--a 153-square-mile chunk of southwestern Alaska territory--which also happens to be next to the heartland of the Coho salmon, king of Alaska's fishing culture, in Bristol Bay.