New Revenue-Virginius owner seeks to reopen it along with Camp Bird, though timeline unknown
The sprawling warehouse at 1900 Main St. in Ouray is strewn with machinery, tools and stacks of furniture.
What’s all the equipment for? Don’t ask Sturges Karban, whose company recently bought the Revenue-Virginius Mine along with the contents of the warehouse — at least not yet.
“We really don’t know what we have,” said Thorin Resources founder and CEO Karban on a recent weekday morning, gesturing to towering shelving units lined with plastic-wrapped mystery goods. “It’s pretty extensive. We moved a lot up to the site over the last month or so and we’re starting to clear out some space. … We’re trying to find some people to actually come in and do a count on everything.”
The equipment is part and parcel of the mining operation, which Thorin Resources bought at auction for the bargain-bin price of $1.8 million after its previous owners’ financial woes left the mine in a court-ordered receivership.
As the dust settles from the tumultuous months leading up to the auction, Karban and his team are wrapping their arms around the challenge before them: How to return not one, but two historic Ouray-area mines to production.
That’s because Thorin Resources is also the owner of the nearby Camp Bird gold mine, which it bought out of bankruptcy six years ago. While Karban was unwilling to offer too many details, he confirmed that getting both mines up and running is the ultimate goal.
“The intent is to put both properties back into operation,” Karban told the Plaindealer. “But timelines and details of that, I really can’t tell.”
CEO’s background
Philadelphia-born and Harvard-educated, Karban comes to the gold and silver industry from 25 years in investment banking.
“My trajectory has generally been, (I) get involved with a company as an advisor from an investment banking perspective and then opportunistically I end up getting more involved and ultimately end up on the operations side,” Karban said.
Karban, who now lives in Florida, said he spent 16 years in California. That includes several years when he was at the helm of ManifestSeven, a firm that aimed “effectively to build the Amazon of cannabis in California,” including retail and delivery for customers.
The company went public on Canadian Securities Exchange in September 2020.
Within a little more than a year, however, the ManifestSeven had sold off several elements of its operations, according to news releases at the time. By April 2022, the exchange had issued a cease trade order to the firm after it missed a key filing deadline.
Karban said while the company had “a lot of success” early on, it ran into trouble trying to get financing during the pandemic.
“At that point, the cannabis industry was a very difficult market to turn a profit on, so your lifeline was the capital markets,” he said. “And when COVID hit, the capital markets dried up. … The last thing that people were looking at doing was investing in speculative companies in an unproven industry.”
From green to gold and silver
Getting into precious metal mining was not always a life goal, according to the Thorin Resources CEO — who confirmed that yes, the company name is a reference to a character in “The Hobbit,” a nod to Karban’s “inner nerd.”
“I didn’t necessarily pick mining,” Karban said. “Mining kind of picked me.”
Several years before Karban took his cannabis venture public, he was a creditor to the Camp Bird gold mine, whose operators at the time were in the midst of a bankruptcy proceeding. Karban’s Caldera Mineral Resources, a subsidiary of Thorin Resources, acquired the mine in September 2017, according to court records. Karban said he took ownership of the mine in exchange for “in-kind consideration” — an acquisition that came with a hefty amount of environmental cleanup.
Since then, Karban said, the mine has been in “care and maintenance” mode, staffed by a skeleton crew.
Last year, when the nearby Revenue- Virginius silver mine landed in receivership after its owners defaulted on a $28 million loan, Karban said he wasn’t out shopping for a second mine. But an initial auction ended in chaos when the original buyer backed out. When the property went up for sale a second time, Thorin Resources subsidiary FAFO Holdings won with its $1.8 million bid.
“The Revenue came out of nowhere. (It) really was opportunistic,” Karban said. “But obviously putting the two of them together presents a pretty exciting synergy.”
What will relaunching operations look like?
Karban said he’s now turning his full attention to his Ouray County mines.
He’s even looking for a home in the area, weary of hotel-hopping and “Elon Musk-ing it” at the warehouse.
He said it’s too soon to comment on a possible schedule for returning the mines to operation, or about the potential number of jobs they could represent if he succeeds.
“We’re extremely committed to the area,” he said. “There’s going to be, over time, I think a significant ramp in headcount, but what the timeline looks like right now, it’s too early to tell.”
Karban said he’s conscious of the fact that other operators have “said a lot of things probably before they should have” in reference to the mine’s potential. When the Revenue-Virginius mine was sold, creditors — including some local businesses — collectively lost more than $60 million in unpaid bills.
“We don’t want to have our heart broken with the assets. We don’t want anyone around us to have their hearts broken with the assets,” Karban said.
While Karban didn’t say how much might be invested in the mines, he said he has put his own money into the venture — and he’s planning to keep Thorin a privately owned company in the foreseeable future.
“This is not a promotional exercise to drive stock prices,” he said. “This really is fundamentally about, how do we build a long-term enterprise that the community will benefit from (and) the investors that put money in will benefit from.”
As for the low cost of his acquisition, that’s so much the better for investing funds directly into the operation, according to Karban.
“We’ve done it the right way, which gives us the ability to … make sure that we can build this out properly,” he said. “It’s different when you start with a massive cost basis.”
As far as technology, Karban said he’s looking at a “standard mining and processing approach.”
“There’s nothing in our model that has what I would call a technology risk,” he said. “… It’s all pretty proven stuff.”
Road access issue
As cold weather approaches, county officials are looking to the mine’s new leaders to reopen a discussion over access to County Road 361, which leads past the gate at Senator Gulch as well as to Imogene Pass beyond the mine.
Ouray Silver Mines Inc., which previously operated the Revenue-Virginius Mine, had an agreement with the county to maintain the road during the winter months. When the site was up and operating, the mine took “above and beyond” responsibility for keeping drivers safe in the area, which is treacherous when icy, according to Ouray County Commissioner Jake Niece.
That included manning a gate and communicating by a dispatch post to ensure traffic was only going in one direction at any time — and that drivers have chains on their tires when needed.
“We just can’t have a situation where someone rents a car with all-season tires … and then comes around a blind corner to find an ore truck coming down and sliding off the side of a cliff and dying,” Niece said.
When the mine went into receivership, the road maintenance and access agreement became a sticking point with the company managing that process, with disagreements over insurance and liability issues emerging as major concerns.
Niece and fellow commissioners Lynn Padgett and Michelle Nauer all agreed that renegotiating the pact with Thorin Resources in a way that can offer safe access to backcountry skiers and ice climbers is crucial.
“I do want to welcome the mine, I hope the mine is able to open and operate, but we also need to maintain public access,” Niece said. “… If they want to assert that there’s going to be no public access, from my perspective, there’s going to be no private access either.”
At a Sept. 12 meeting with county commissioners, Karban said he would make his team available for a workshop session on the road issue.
“We want to accommodate what’s important to the county and to Ouray and I don’t see any issue doing that,” Karban told the Plaindealer.
Broader community impact Local leaders agree that, if Karban and Thorin Resources succeed in restarting mining operations at both properties, it could give a significant economic boost to the region.
“Ouray County and especially the city of Ouray (are) really heavily tourism-driven, and the evergreen conversation and local economics is, how do we diversify?” Niece said.
Nauer, who has lived in the area for more than four decades, said historically, mining was Ouray’s main economic engine, while Ridgway was more of a ranching community.
“When I came here in the early ’80s, all the mines were shutting down and it really hit the community hard,” she said. “So just to … know that they’re really trying to get the mines open again is good news for everybody.”
Local housing inventory is a perennial concern, Nauer and Niece said, but one the county is working to try to address.
As for other impacts on the community, Padgett said she hopes to see strong commitment to the environment from the mine’s new operators — a value she said was clear with the previous owners.
“(I) would love to see a worldclass example of a metal mine following all environmental rules and regulations, and also demonstrating best management practices,” Padgett said. “We do need metals for even renewable energy projects and the renewable energy economy … but want to see it done in a very responsible way.”
Niece and Padgett both described the mine’s past operators as community-oriented, and said they hope to see that attitude with Thorin Resources. For example, Niece said, the mine staff at one point made sure their heavy trucks drove through the nearby ice park at night, to avoid rumbling through while visitors were walking around.
“I think that comes from the previous operators just having lived in Ouray for a long time,” Niece said. “… I hope that we can maintain an open dialogue (with the new owners).”
