John Curran
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Dec 07/05) - December may be a month most folks slow down at work and focus on shopping and family.

That's not the case with the team at Tyhee Development Corp.

The junior mining firm just wrapped up a stock placement that generated $1.7 million to fund more work out on the Yellowknife Gold Project, located about 90 km north of the city near the old Discovery gold mine.

"We've had a Connors Drilling crew there since the weekend ... they'll be there until about Dec. 15," said Dave Webb, Tyhee president and chief executive officer. "There's about five or six in the crew plus another four camp support people."

This new drilling will give the company all the information it needs to generate a revised resource estimate, which will then be plugged into its pre-feasibility study in time for a pre-Christmas release date.

"The technical aspects of the project are going good," he said. "We're finding gold where we expect to find it."

Tyhee has already made a presentation to the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Review Board and is in the process of addressing a couple of areas where they needed to provide more information.

"They wanted more geotechnical details on our tailings pond, for example," he said. "We're about 90 days from having everything completed and back in to the review board."

If the Yellowknife Gold Project makes it through the permitting process and into production, Webb estimates it would likely employ fewer than 300 people.

"It might even be less than 200 jobs. We're just a small operation compared to the diamond mines," he said. "They have annual revenues of $500 million - that's about the value of our total resource, and it's going to take money to get it out of the ground."

The current estimate puts the projected mine life at seven years.

Webb hopes it will end up being much longer than that.

"What you have to remember is Con Mine opened in 1936 and by 1938 it only had a two-year projected life," he said.

"It costs about $50 to find an ounce of gold, so if I'm not going to mine it for eight or nine years, why would I invest the money to find it today?"