SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Tom Gold Mine hasn't been active since 1997, but since it was recently purchased by a Vancouver-based exploration company, hopes to resume production look promising.

Tom Gold Mine, located about 15 km outside Yellowknife, just off the Igraham Trail, was recently purchased by Trivello, a junior mining company in southern Canada looking to tap into the gold market. - Andrew Livingstone/NNSL photo

Trivello Ventures bought the defunct mine, located 15 km outside Yellowknife along the Ingraham Trail, and some 630 acres of land in the hopes of resurrecting one of Yellowknife's last operational gold mines.

Arndt Roehlig, president of Trivello Ventures, a Vancouver-based natural gas exploration company, said the purchase of the mine from Zintu Capital Corporation, which produced over 4,000 ounces of gold from February 1986 to July 1987, is a move to diversify the company. With the price of natural gas down and the cost of producing oil high, Roehlig said it decided to shift focus from oil and gas to a commodity with a price continually climbing.

"We needed to drill a second gas well in Fort Nelson and just the mobilization cost of the drill rig was $500,000 to get it there," he said. "I said 'lets stop going out into the moose pasture and lets start dealing with projects that are close to the infrastructure and service industries.'"

Roehlig said the Tom Mine site was very attractive to the company when it started looking for projects to invest in, adding the fact the site is within close proximity to Yellowknife and available mining services was a big part of the decision to purchase. A geologist friend of Roehlig's told Trivello Ventures about the site and the stakes he had placed there. and the shoe fit.

"I'm always of the experience that the closer to home, the better," said Roehlig. "I don't like doing business outside the country and I prefer the west coast. Yellowknife is just a couple hundred kilometres from Alberta.

"The infrastructure is there and it was producing in the past. It's close to the service industry, all those dominoes were setting themselves up in a line for us to take advantage of. It was easy for us to make the change.

"We got rid of all our oil assets in Alberta and still have some in B.C., but we're making the shift to gold."

The next step now for Trivello will be to determine just how much gold is actually on the property. Ore from Tom Mine and the adjacent Ptarmigan Mine - both owned by Treminco until it shut down production in 1997 due to crashing gold prices - were processed at the same plant, Roehlig said. Because of this, he said, the company isn't sure how much gold is still on the property, but it expects positive outcomes from sampling to be done in the near future.

"It's hard to see exactly which ore came from which mine," said Roehlig. "We're compiling all the historic data to see what work we need to do and to find a number of how much gold is left there. That's going to take a while to do.

"We'll be surface sampling and drill some holes, and with a positive outcome of that we're going to work on the next step of opening up the mine again."

While full-on production won't happen for at least a few years, Roehlig said it plans to hire local companies to help them get the project to fruition, including hiring Northerners to work at the mine.

"We're not shy from hiring service companies at all," he said. "We like doing that. It helps with the community you're working with by hiring (local) companies to come out and get this mine back online.

"I'd like to start on a good note with the community in moving this project forward. You need to have a good relationship with the community.

"We definitely want to draw on the talent there to do any of the work we need to get done. Clean up work is one of them and I don't think that work will come from Edmonton. We're excited because the infrastructure is already there."