Mineral Exploration

14 S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 Photograph : Cour te sy of Mark Rebagliati industry hoping and dreaming. Until 1993 it was a fairly conventional tale of companies doing a few years of work and finding a few things – in this case, Huckleberry's Main Zone – but not enough to keep drilling. New Canamin Resources Ltd. optioned the property in 1992 and, like those who had come before, initially focused on the known Main Zone. It took a short hole drilled in 1993 for investigation of potential tailings disposal locations to intersect 0.905 per cent copper over eight metres to discover the East Zone. Through the rest of 1993 and 1994, a further 131 holes were drilled to outline the full extent of the deposit. Operations commenced in 1997 and Huckleberry has a current mine life to 2022 – all thanks to condemnation drill- ing. (On January 6, 2016, Huckleberry suspended its pit operations.) 8. KSM The Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell project is as much a story of seeing potential as it is of discovering deposits. Individually, these deposits had all been known to some degree since at least the early 1980s. Placer Dome Inc. undertook consider- able work from the late 1980s onwards, and had separately modelled both the Kerr and Sulphurets deposits. Seabridge Gold Inc. acquired the properties in 2001 and has completed significant amounts of exploration drilling since then. It has further delineated the Mitchell and Iron Cap deposits, and intersected addi- tional mineralization at the appropriately named Deep Kerr deposit. Along with new discoveries, Seabridge has shown the potential to bring these deposits together into one cohesive and ambitious project. With a proposed 52-year mine plan, the KSM project will be a major source of employment in northwest B.C. well into the future. 9. MOUNT POLLEY If there is one word to describe the development and ongoing operation of Mount Polley, it is "resilience." It is difficult to pinpoint when exactly this deposit was discovered; an aeromagnetic anomaly was noted on a federal-provincial map in 1963. The site was the focus of a series of exploration programs by several different companies from 1966 to 1987 with a total of 33,736 metres of drilling completed in that time, but it took Imperial Metals (and an addi- tional 27,566 metres of core) to make it economic. The mine went into produc- tion in 1997 but was placed on care and maintenance just four years later due to low metal prices. Exploration continued throughout the shutdown period and the mine was reopened in 2005. Drilling in 2010 intersected deeper mineraliza- tion, which subsequently led to plans for underground mining. Operations were again suspended in mid-2014 following a tailings dam breach but, after substantial and ongoing rehabilitation work, Mount Polley resumed modified operations in mid-2015. All indications are that this resilient deposit will continue to be an important contributor to B.C. for years to come. 10. NEW AFTON New Afton is another excellent example of how drilling deeper can change the path of a project. In this instance, it was the exploration of a worked-out deposit that had been left open to depth. It occu- pies the historic Afton Mine site, which operated from 1977 to 1997, and it is extracting deeper portions of that same deposit. New Afton has earned its place on this list as the only successful block cave mining operation in B.C. and as a significant current producer. ■ The discoverers: A trio of H.H. "Spud" Huestis Award recipients – Richard Haslinger, Sr., Mark Rebagliati and Lorne Warren – in the field at Warren's VHMS property. Westcoast.indd

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