For the life of me I cannot figure out why they call it Red Lake. It is very plainly blue. As blue as the sky. Not even the sky is red at night.
I understand it is a mining town, at the end of a long windy road going north of highway 17 on the way to Kenora. There are a lot of moose on that road. Deer too. You would not think you would see deer that far north, but there they are.
The restaurants in Red Lake are so-so. Not terrible, but not grand. Hotel accommodations fair. No really good place to buy hunting and fishing gear that I noticed off-hand. Perhaps I was not very diligent in examining shopping opportunities. There are few good assay labs there, and they are fairly busy.
I noticed the odd gold vein here and there, but it did not seem like the drilling was a veritable hive of activity. If you read the old reports you would see that there were scads of mines and drillers. A lot of theory about this carbonate and that. A bit of the explo today is rehashing old theories. A few new ones around and few rocks have gold in them that were not previously expected.
The exploration today will be successful if they just strike out and drill on good showings and structures. (They don't all need Goldcorp-like theory or the same horizon, as there were lots of mines in the old days that mimicked neither structure nor gold type of the Dickenson-Red Lake mines.) Not much drilling was done in the 1980's. There were land rushes but little follow up. It was not like the nineteen thirties were headframes started springing up everywhere.
One thing seems certain, the Goldcorp discovery seems to have shocked companies out of the common habit of drilling shallowly. Finally some gold explorers are admitting the gold may change from horizon to horizon and deeper horizons may be of richer character entirely. This theory was not really suspected until Kirkland Lake, where much of the really good gold was found around 4000 feet, a fact which confounded the conventional geologists who all expected back then that gold grade had to decrease as the basement rocks were approached and heat of formation presumably increased. This theory is now known to be wrong, as the gold was emplaced in formations that have been subsequently uplifted by many orogenies since the Archean. In Africa and South America where British geologists frequented, the opposite was the case, as the gold and copper occurred together and as you went deeper in the sediments, and got closer to the heat source, the copper grade increased and the gold grade decreased. These gold deposits were frequently high in silver near the surface, a clue of their lack of depth "capability". They are called mesothermal. Few if any CDN gold deposits are of this type. Perhaps one in 40. That is why it is really such a childish question to ask if one can find gold at depth in many CDN mines or in this or that drilling program. They nearly always "go down". If you don't drill deep you are usually making a major mistake. The exact reason for this has to do with rock deformation but it actually quite complex. In fact the deposits were probably emplaced almost laterally in large scale. Their host rocks could have been considered almost flat lying. Their mountain building had only just begun when the deposition started.
The deposits of Canada however are much different than Archean deposits elsewhere. In Russia for instance, the Archean gold deposits do not go below 1500 feet most often. CDN gold deposits are mostly Archean with a few exceptions. They are high temperature gold deposits, called hyperthermal. This class of deposits has a better chance of being of size than epithermal deposits, as the heat source for the fluids can be more concentrated. A very large long lasting felsic source must drive a large epithermal deposit. This is not necessary for a hyperthermal deposit, as it may be nearer the volcano and shorter lived in deposition. This is why CDN gold deposits are frequently found near underwater volcanic rocks. The seawater supplied the waters of deposition and the volcano supplied the heat. The nearby porphyry rock remained hot enough long enough to keep the deposition temperature high over a long period and a wide area to make the deposit large and even grade. Ergo, wherever you find pillow lava (an underwater volcanic rock) and quartz feldspar porphyry extensively, you will find what CDN's call medium to high grade gold, and everybody else calls high grade. (0.2 to one ounce per ton ore) The heat signatures of gold mines are given by the types of minerals found in the veins. This is found to be from Greenschist facies to upper greenschist facies. What this means is certain minerals that precipitate from a melt rock at certain temperatures are found to be in the veins. These minerals are often blue, blue-green to green. A green rock is a gold rock. It is coloured green by chlorite, or chrome mica.
CDN gold deposits are of a size and grade class that is not frequently found in many other areas. CDN gold mines routinely go anwywhere from 10 to 100 million tons. (Hemlo is actually one structure, of so far, 133 million tons. The Hollinger was 50 million tons.) Compared to quartz gold lodes elsewhere this is a fantastic size. A great number of CDN gold deposits are what they call "Bonanza Type" in the United States. In other words they have frequent, very high grades in pockets.
This is by no means always the case, as many are disseminated gold so to speak, and even in grade. Not realizing the size of CDN gold structures in the past, many gold companies often drilled on very small step outs of 50 feet or less. In good gold areas one can step out 500 to thousand feet with impunity. (Don't do it will-nilly!)WC has one deposit that stretches for 2500 metres with no sign of ending in either direction from its extremities. That ain't small, bubie.
If you find good gold at the surface, you might as well step out and see if you have it over a couple of miles. 80% of the time you may. And then drill down to 1000, 2000, 3000 and 4000. You are looking for a mine, not a mineral collecting locality. Might as well see if one might be there. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring.
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