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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold and Silver Juniors, Mid-tiers and Producers -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: onepath who wrote (17493)	8/3/2006 9:54:42 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78411

Esso Minerals used to operate Granduc out of Stewart in the 1980's. I visited them when they were looking to shut it down. They were taking the ore out and hauling it to the mill thru a tunnel thru the mountains on a ten mile track. Quite the operation. I suggested to them that they look for the source of the placer gold found widely in the creeks there in the many mapped sulfide occurences nearby. I knew that to be the gold source in other BC placers. They did not hire me to do that job but the idea was picked up by explorers Cominco and Pezim's group, and a series of gold deposits were worked in that area, Johnny Mt. being one of them and Eskay Creek. I had suggested to Esso that they start on the creek of that name. Even with all the explo and finding in the area at that time they did not exhaust all the possibilities for gold in massive sulfides. It is hard to get out, and requires smelting the ore. Expensive and needs high grade. There are other approaches to the milling that would work. Roasting, autoclave etc.... Now it is easier to get people to chase copper elephants up there than entice people to look for gold in the hills. Beshhi deposits in BC were the focus of Geddes Res. back in the 80's and they fond a whopper in the Windy Craggy in the Stikine, a valley over or two. The BC government stopped them then, claiming massively incorrectly that the environmental problems could not be solved. They parked that whole area and sealed off the richest copper resources in Canada forever. The WC was 400,000,000 tons of plus one percent copper. Cominco geos told me in the 70's that you could find a copper orebody a day flying a helicopter up there and shining an x-ray flourescence laser out the window at the ubiquitous gossans. Cominco was not interested in development up there because of the distance and expense of site construction and adding copper smelting capacity. They could not then get the BC gov to unbend tax wise to allow development the Big Ledge Zinc deposit of 60 million tons in the far more accessible Kootenays. That was going to cost 800 million then, and the gov wanted to take their water power away, driving the power costs sky high. The province finally got hold of the company owned dam near Trail, and this helped force the eventual shut down of the Sullivan as costs rose and the ore dwindled. There were about 4 other large deposits in the Koots, comprising a known 300 million tons of medium grade zinc. Cominco needed tax concessions to employ the 2000 people they would need, to build a town and add capacity. BC Socreds and NDP in turn refused the industry. Like Inco who at the time were getting tax static (no infrastructure deductions allowed, all buildings had to be mobile on mine sites...) and smelter emissions hassle from the Feds and the province, they decided to look overseas at more "concessionary" governments. Guatemala and elsewhere for Inco; Alaska for Cominco, where massive zinc gossans where known. They would build 100 miles of road in the Arctic and a 500 million dollar concentrator out of province sooner than talk to the BC government again. 132 mines large and small closed in the Pacific Northwest, and 250 suppliers and contractors pulled out of BC. About 60,000 jobs were lost for good in that province. EC<:-}