We chatted for a bit and then we had to take off, but I kept what he said in the back of my mind as we rushed out to some other gold-bearing place in the Mother Lode to feed our gold fever.

Historically, Montana has been an important gold producer, in terms of both lodes and placers, and it still produces gold for the prospector today.

My mining partner Keith McBride and I spent a week in May working on a twenty-nine man crew split up into six teams at a couple of “pay to mine” mining camps.

This rock had been with a family for many years and they were cleaning up an old workshop that had lots of minerals and miscellaneous “ore” samples.

The metal is expensive, not because it is rare but because of the expense to produce and work it. The minerals mined for titanium are all oxides, unlike many base metals that are mostly mined as sulfide minerals.