Abstract Kennecott Minerals Company (KMC) operates a 15,000-ton-per-day open-pit gold mine located approximately 5 miles east of the town of Ridgeway, and 25 miles north of Columbia, South Carolina (Figure 1). The Ridgeway gold mine is one of four gold mines which were put in production in South Carolina in the 1980’s. It is currently the only operating gold mine in the Eastern United States. The Ridgeway mine produces gold bullion from two bulk-mineable, open-pit deposits located one mile apart. Low-grade oxide and sulfide ore produced from the siliceous deposits is blasted and hauled to a central mill complex. Ore is milled to minus 200 mesh, and gold is extracted by a carbon-in-pulp, electrowinning process. The mine operates 24 hours a day, and employs over 100 people. The mine began producing gold in December 1988 and total developed in order to achieve an ultimate production goal of 1.5 million ounces of gold bullion by the year 2000. The North Pit is 2,000 feet long, 1,400 feet wide, and 320 feet deep. The South Pit is 2,600 feet long, 1,500 feet wide, and 360 feet deep. The South Pit is being mined at full scale, and is expected to be mined out by June 1996. Activity in the North Pit is currently focused on the stripping of oxide ore and waste at the 420-440 level along the northern half of the pit. Future development plans for the North Pit include deepening the pit from the 120 elevation to -40 elevation. This paper

Abstract The Haile gold mine is located in southern Lancaster County, South Carolina, near the town of Kershaw. Gold was discovered at the site in 1827, and four periods of mining have yielded 360,000 ounces of gold. The mine is located between the past producing Ridgeway and Brewer mines that, when all are combined, constitute a significant amount of historical gold production in the southeastern United States. These mines are hosted within Neoproterozoic to lower Cambrian Carolina terrane rocks and are dominated by volcanic and epiclastic units that have experienced greenschist facies metamorphism. Saprolitic weathering is present in the near-surface portions of the deposit and is locally covered by Cretaceous-aged Coastal Plain sediments. The gold mineralization at the Haile mine is hosted within silicified meta-sediments containing fine-grained disseminated pyrite and pyrrhotite and is a replacement type-epithermal deposit. Re-Os ages from molybdenite associated with the mineralization indicate that the deposit formed shortly after major, arc-related volcanic activity. Haile currently has a measured and indicated resource of 4.03 million ounces at an average grade of 1.77 g/t Au with an additional inferred resource of 801,000 ounces at an average grade of 1.24 g/t Au. Included in the resource is a reserve of 2.02 million ounces of gold at an average grade of 2.06 g/t. Mine construction began in May 2015, and gold production is expected by the end of 2016. The construction cost is expected to be US$380 million. Ore will be extracted from eight open pits with mill extraction and the current mine life is 14 years.

Abstract First, this volume explores the Haile gold mine, which is located in southern Lancaster County, South Carolina. Gold was discovered at the site in 1827, and the mine is located between the past producing Ridgeway and Brewer mines that, when all are combined, constitute a significant amount of historical gold production in the southeastern United States. The second guide focuses on the geology and geomorphology of the Carolina Sandhills in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, an area in the updip portion of the U.S. Atlantic Coastal Plain province. The third guide provides a structural analysis of the Kiokee belt and its framing elements: Savannah River transect.

Abstract Renewed gold exploration in the Carolina slate belt of North and South Carolina that led to the discovery of the Ridgeway gold mine (#5 on Figure 1) by Amselco (now Kennecott) began at about the same time as the last Geological Society of America field trip to focus on southeastern metal deposits. That trip occurred in the fall of 1980 as part of the national GSA meeting in Atlanta, Georgia (Bell, Carpenter, and Feiss, 1980). On that trip at stop 8, Henry Bell described abundant hydrothermal alteration similar to the Haile and Brewer mines in an area with no known gold mines. He noted that auger cuttings from a hole drilled by the South Carolina Geological Survey in the 1960’s near stop 8 at Mount Rehovah church contained 0.06 ppm gold and 220 ppm copper in the upper 9 feet of rock and 10 ppm molybdenum from 30-40 feet. Because the values decreased with depth, the gold was attributed to surface enrichment (Bell, 1976). Samples collected by Bell (1976) of small drainage basins in the region contained up to 1000 ppm tin in heavy mineral concentrates that were also anomalous in gold, boron, lanthanum, niobium, beryllium, and copper (Figure 16 of Bell, Carpenter, and Feiss, 1980). Bell et al. (1980) stated “Geochemical data suggest that this region is on the periphery of an area having many of the ore-bearing characteristics of the Haile and Brewer mines” Stop 8 was only hundred’s of feet west of the present site of the