While out and about today on a trip to Dillon, Montana to see if we could score any Patagonia gear at their Labor Day outlet sale (it was a mad house and a pair of ski pants alpine climbing pants were secured at a hefty discount), one of the lingering little gold mysteries that had popped into my head over the years was solved.

It really didn’t take much to solve this riddle – it was more a matter of it never rising to the level where any attention was ever focused on it.

To wit, how can they sell these little bottles that are seemingly filled with gold (about two inches high) in the many Gold Country gift shops that dot the western U.S. for just six or eight dollars a pop?

Surely, there has to be more than a couple dollars worth of gold in these little bottles that are marked “99.99 Percent Pure Gold” while, at the same time, the manufacturer and retailer can’t be selling them at a loss.

Well, malleability is the operative word here and a display in the mining section of the Dillon Museum is what prompted the writing of this post. According to one of the displays, a single ounce of gold can be hammered into a flat sheet that spreads out into something like a 100 foot square. (Note that I don’t recall the exact number, but it was much, much bigger than you would believe when looking down at a one-ounce gold coin in the palm of your hand that is about an inch and a half in diameter).

Apparently, gold leaf can made unbelievably thin, a post over at Zero Hedge today noting that it “is commonly 0.18 microns (seven millionths of an inch) thick. It’s so thin that a stack of 7,055 sheets would be no thicker than a dime.”

The folks who make these little bottles filled with gold leaf are probably making a killing.