SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Con Mine has been closed down since 2003 but, tiny flecks of gold were left behind, caught here and there in the mill. Thousands of tiny flecks, potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They couldn't be retrieved, until now.

Scott Stringer stands before the demolished mill, where tons of gold-laced material have been recovered. - Erika Sherk/NNSL photo

The cleanup has reached the demolition phases, which means that piles of leftover "material" - rocks, dirt, heavy metals, silver and yes, gold - are finally accessible.

It sounds like an exciting discovery: hundreds of ounces of gold found while cleaning up an old mine.

"It's not like we found a bunch of gold that was lost or anything. If we did we'd all be really happy about that, but that's not the case at all," says Scott Stringer, general manager of Newmont Mining, the company that now owns the mine and is doing the reclamation. "We just knew there would be some areas where we could recover some gold-bearing material."

When the mine was operating, the material would circulate through the entire mill, he explained. Not all of it would make it through, getting stuck in "low points in the mill where everything accumulates."

Once the demolition teams had extracted piles of the material, they separated out the metals, which are heavier than the rocks and dirt, and sent them off to a lab for testing.

If it's worth something, Newmont will send it out for further refining and eventually sell it, said Stringer.

He couldn't say exactly how much gold-bearing material had been sent out. "Over the years, we've done several trips each year." The last trip was 60 tons.

"It helps us offset our costs to do the demolition work," says Stringer.

The company has already recovered several hundred ounces of gold, he says, though he could not give an exact figure. With gold prices recently around $1,000 U.S. per ounce, it could bring in a hefty sum for the company, depending on the grade.

At Giant Mine, the NWT Mining Heritage Society has also encountered gold in its preservation work.

"We've got a smelting pot and there's a smear of gold on it," says Walt Humphries, president of the society, "That'll go on display eventually but that's the nature of gold, it tends to get stuck on things, it will get stuck in the cracks on the floor."

Any gold found by the society will go on display. "We're not in the gold mining business," he laughs.

It's just a tiny bit here or there, he says, people shouldn't think there's gold just lying around. "I don't want to start a gold rush."

Stringer stressed the fact that at Con Mine the gold was only accessible through demolition and has all been removed from the mine for processing.

"I don't want people to think they can come out here and just dig around for gold." Though safety is a focus at the mine, given its proximity to Yellowknife, "the landscape changes every day. It's not safe for the public to be wandering around the mine site."

A better place to look might be in the streets, Humphries says. When Yellowknife was first being built, crushed rock from the mines was used for making roads and building houses.

"I've known several people who've picked up gold samples just along the side of the road," he says.