6. first real estate venture in which we acquired large land acreage for inventory and subsequent development. The basic thrust of management's efforts was to find ways to accumulate the construction skills it had in different but similar but more rewarding directions. It was consistent with this philosophy that we came up with the idea that we could manufacture land by taking land unusable in its natural form and level it or fill it to make the land usable and more valuable. We purchased land north of the San Francisco Airport and levelled the hilly areas and filled the marshland to make what is now Utah's South San Francisco Industrial Park as well as the property now developed by Cabot, Cabot and Forbes. We acquired dredges and used them to fill land on the Alameda South Shore and Bay Farm Island and later diverted those dredges to uses in Japan and in Western Australia. Our early mining ventures were also based on the philosophy that Utah with long experience as a contract miner and earth mover for others could utilize these skills for its own account, developing properties too small to be of interest to our mining clientele, equipping them with used equipment from our construction work and thereby attaining a low capital cost, and operating them with construction personnel. The reasoning behind this philosophy prove fallacious, for we learned that small mines have all the problems without the rich rewards of large mines, used equipment is not the efficient way to equip a mine, and mining people are far better at running mines than construction personnel. The Argonnaut mine was a financial disaster in its early days and almost stopped Utah's further expansion in the mining area. The capital costs and the operating costs were more than double the earlier estimates and the confidence of the Board in Utah's mining capabilities was severely shaken.