Betting on a repeat
Historic Thompson-Lundmark mine picked up for development
Walter Strong
Northern News Services
Published Tuesday, December 9, 2014
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
When the historic Thompson-Lundmark mine was lost to the 1998 Tibbitt Lake forest fire, some said it was a good thing because it saved the bother of having to raze the remaining buildings, others said it was the terrible loss of another piece of Northern history.
A field worker approaches a historic building on the former Thompson Lundmark Mine site 48 km northeast of Yellowknife. Active for six years in the 1940s, the mine site was finally wiped out by a forest fire in 1998. Now, new company wants to develop a new mine on the property. - photo courtesy Perlis Enterprise Inc.
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No one, at least on record, suggested those fires may have been clearing the way for a new mine. But that may turn out to have been the case.
In the fall of 2012, privately held Perlis Enterprise Inc. purchased the entire mine site, located 48 km northeast of Yellowknife, along with approximately 10 square kilometres of related mineral claims.
Discovered at the tail end of Yellowknife's original gold rush, the property was active between 1938 when first staked by Fred Thompson and Roy Lundmark until 1949, when then merchantable mineral reserves were depleted.
The mine saw six years of production between 1941 and 1949, with an interruption during the Second World War.
In total, 133,989 tonnes of ore were milled, producing 70,339 ounces of gold and 13,782 ounce of silver.
According to an NWT and Nunavut Chamber of Mining document summarizing technical historical data preserved at the NWT Geoscience Office, only three of the seven mineralized veins discovered on the property were ever mined.
The main veins, the Fraser and Kim, were considered at the time to have been mined out of known economic reserves.
A third rich vein, Treasure Island, returned high grade showings of 1.46 ounces per tonne gold in drill core. But this vein was hardly mined before the shutdown. Only 35 tonnes of ore were mined on Treasure Island, returning 0.72 ounces gold per tonne from surface mining.
In 1983 Ardic Exploration and Development Ltd. optioned the mineral claims and completed a small exploration program. The results from Ardic's exploration combined with Thompson-Lundmark reports from the late 70s and early 80s, pointed towards 190,000 tonnes of ore grading 0.30 ounces gold per tonne -- or up to 57,000 ounces of gold -- remaining in the main Kim vein alone.
The Thompson-Lundmark project is Toronto-based Perlis Enterprises' sole project. Anton Glukhov, VP of exploration, was part of the team that discovered the large Kupol silver-gold deposit in northeast Russia, now owned and mined by Kinross Gold Corp.
Since acquiring the property in 2012, Perlis has done limited work, but prospecting done on the property returned high grade grab samples of up to 472 grammes per tonne (g/t) gold.
