dj, yes indeed. It does seem small to us ruralians (country boys). Urbanites (city folks) often don't realize how small it is. 500 acres could be like 20 X 25 acres, and the wide side at 25 acres times 210' on one side of a square acre (using even rounded numbers) is just about a mile across. The 20 acre side would be about 8/10 mile. A football field is probably close to an acre. I don't know how wide a football field is.
It doesn't take long to walk my rough property but when I'm toting fence posts, post driver, transit, flagging ribbon, beer cooler and other equipment, and stopping to do the work including surveying and measuring, it takes time. My property is only about 1/2 a mile long but it's thickly wooded, lots of walking.
Another point is that if it's gold laden, that can be a lot of gravel/ore to sift thru. Just mining the surface they can go down pretty deep. I think it's as much as 300 feet deep but I'm not going to look it up now and it may vary from place to place anyway.
It's very hard to get financing for a small or startup operation of any kind these days, PMs or oil & gas, whatever. We need the money to bring the gold out, the financiers need to see the gold to loan the money. It's the classic chicken or the egg.
The property can be seen as either large or small, depends on your prospective. They can always consider buying surrounding properties or selling to neighboring mines. Whatever comes from this, it's not going to happen soon IMO.
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