Mineral Exploration

Ken McNaughton, Ken Konkin and Ron Burk Kevin Torpy, Joseph Ovsenek and David Prins 10 Mineral Exploration | amebc.ca ALL PHOTOS: VELOUR PRODUCTIONSAME And the Winner Is… Standout members of the industry take home the honours at the 2017 AME Awards By the AME AWARDS COMMITTEE AME saluted its leaders at the AME Awards Celebration of Excellence gala on January 24 during the AME Roundup 2018 conference. H.H. "SPUD" HUESTIS AWARD RON BURK, KEN KONKIN AND KEN MCNAUGHTON Ron Burk, Ken Konkin and Ken McNaughton are the recipients of the 2017 H.H. "Spud" Huestis Award for excellence in prospecting and mineral exploration in British Columbia and/ or Yukon. They are being honoured for their pivotal roles in discovering the Valley of the Kings (VOK) deposit at the Brucejack mine in northwestern British Columbia. The Brucejack mine entered commercial production for Pretium Resources Inc. in July 2017 and is expected to produce more than seven million ounces of gold over the next 18 years. Burk joined Silver Standard Resources Inc. in 2004 as chief geologist. Konkin worked as a consulting geologist, including on numerous projects in the Golden Triangle, prior to joining Silver Standard in 1995. Konkin was the project manager for all of the Snowfield and Brucejack surface exploration programs completed by Silver Standard and Pretium. McNaughton began working at Silver Standard in 1991 as the exploration manager, ultimately becoming its senior vice-president, exploration. He moved over to Pretium shortly after its listing as a public company, where he is currently the chief exploration oŸicer. In their time together at Silver Standard from 2004 until 2011, the three recipients achieved great success making significant new discoveries in Argentina, Peru, Mexico and British Columbia. They formed an eŸicient team with a common passion for exploration, to which each also brought his own unique perspective and talents. Silver Standard's exploration activities on the property began at the Snowfield project in 2006. For the first three seasons, the company drilled oŸ a large low-grade resource of copper- gold porphyry mineralization. In 2008, a review was started covering the Brucejack portion of the property, which was known to host a small silver/gold resource at West Zone and a number of precious metal showings. The compilation of the historic database was completed in 2009 and contained a large number of high-grade gold samples spread over the length of the property. This study included the documentation of about 16,000 surface samples and a limited amount of historic drilling outside of West Zone. Remarkably, there were over 100 chip samples with assays exceeding one ounce per ton gold, only one of which was directly associated with what would become VOK. In the summer of 2009, an initial drill program was completed to test for bulk tonnage gold mineralization, drilling several zones located over the length of the property with holes spaced at 100- and 200-metre centres. That program intersected extreme-grade gold values almost immediately, including hole SU- 012, which ran 16,948.5 grams per tonne gold over 1.5 metres and would later become known as the discovery hole for VOK. However, the discovery came not in any single drill hole, but in the early recognition of the potential of the high- grade mineralization being intersected by the widely spaced drilling. Extreme-grade gold intervals became an instant hallmark of the deposit. Understanding how they related to the system would take several more years of intensive study to achieve. That first program totalled 37 drill holes; it was followed up in 2010 with a 73-hole program that was designed in part to test the continuity of the mineralization at VOK. In late 2010, Pretium was formed

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