You have that backwards. You need cash flow or you have nothing at all. When you produce some cash then you can dig holes. When you are done digging holes you can dig gravel. When you are finally digging gravel you will find out if it is a gold rich terrace or just a typical terrace anywhere in northern California. Which is to say it has trace gold in it but nothing worth spending money on.
Who cares if the gold rich terrace is 60 ft or 90 ft away?
Well I think everyone would actually care seeing that the difference between 60 feet and 100 feet is about 5 months and $1,000,000 bucks at the speed NBRI digs bad raises. And the distance could be well in excess of 100 feet. Since after all you have no idea where the terrace really is in comparison to the "stable" rock.
And since they are sitting on a negative cash pile when they finally do find someone willing to loan them $2M they will just be paying their back rent and still have no cash to work the mine with.
Placing things into the geological context
Right.
the geologists followed the gold in order to remove it. They dug in the most likely places to find gold and bypassed the areas that had gold but not in quantities worth digging for.