For 160 years, placer miners chased the easy gold. They got the nuggets. They got the coarse stuff. Then they moved on, calling the ground "mined out."
They left behind the flour gold that escaped their sluices. The crack gold trapped in bedrock. The deep channel deposits they couldn't reach. Gold that was never even counted.
Lost Horizon recovers what everyone else left behind.
The Insight
Standard sampling methods—pans, churn drills, RC drilling—systematically lose flour gold. It floats away. It blows out of the hole. It washes off with the sample water.
Every historical estimate, every feasibility study, every resource calculation is built on data that structurally undercounts the finest gold fractions.
That gold didn't disappear. It's still in the ground. Waiting for technology that can actually capture it.
We're not re-mining depleted resources. We're mining resources the industry's own tools couldn't see.
What We Unlock
Our technology works on any unconsolidated material with a bedrock floor. That opens up entire categories of deposits that conventional mining walked away from.
Already processed once—still full of the flour gold that escaped recovery. Permitted, accessible, and written off as waste.
They got the easy stuff. The flour gold floor, crack gold, and thalweg deposits remain untouched beneath the surface.
Too deep, too wet for conventional methods. The conditions that bankrupted historical miners are exactly what our system thrives in.
Our artificial saturation breakthrough means we're not limited to water-table deposits. If it's unconsolidated with a bedrock floor, we can work it.
Gravity guarantees gold accumulated in the deepest parts of ancient stream channels. Historical miners couldn't reach them. We can.
Flour gold that escapes conventional recovery. Microscopic particles too small to sluice—but heavy enough for gravity concentration.
The Technology
We don't dig pits. We don't build dredges. We don't move millions of tons of overburden. We go straight to the gold and bring it to the surface.
Process in place
Closed-loop system
Gravity separation
A well pad, not a moonscape
Pneumatic fracturing opens pathways in bedrock and compacted material. Controlled water injection mobilizes fine gold particles. Gravity does the concentrating—the same force that put the gold there in the first place.
We extract an enriched concentrate and process a fraction of the material that conventional mining would require. The physics are simple: gold is heavy. When you mobilize sediment and let it settle, the gold goes to the bottom.
See How It WorksThe Economics
Every "mined out" deposit has a baseline value in flour gold alone—the roughly 30% of original gold that escaped historical recovery. This creates a guaranteed minimum return before we even look for upside.
Gravity is constant. Gold is heavy. The deepest channel lines—the thalwegs—contain concentrated deposits that historical miners couldn't access. This isn't speculation. It's physics.
Conventional placer mining moves massive volumes to find small amounts of gold. We target the gold directly, processing a fraction of the material at a fraction of the cost.
The Impact
We're not competing with existing operations. We're creating a new category.
Deposits that were "uneconomic" become profitable. Ground that was "exhausted" becomes productive. Resources that were "too small" for conventional mining become viable.
Every worked-over claim, every abandoned tailings pile, every deposit that killed the last three companies who tried—that's our opportunity.
Lost Horizon. Finding gold that's been hiding for 160 years.
Partner With Us
We're actively seeking partnerships with landowners, claim holders, and mining operations who have ground that conventional methods can't crack.
We bring the technology. You bring the ground. We split the gold.
ted@losthorizon.goldThe Name
Every deposit has a lost horizon—the gold that was never seen, never counted, never recovered.
In 1933, James Hilton wrote about Shangri-La—a place just beyond the horizon everyone else had given up on reaching.
Every placer district has its own lost horizons. The channel that drowned the dredge. The flour gold that slipped through the sluice. The bedrock nobody could scrape. The thalweg under fifty feet of water. The grade that was "unrecoverable."
They lost it. We found it.