TerraX finds high gold values
Company still says years of work needed before a mine
Karen K. Ho
Northern News Services
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
TerraX Minerals says results from some of its recent grab bag samples show gold values as high as 94.9 grams of gold per tonne, which is almost 16 times the amount of Con Mine's average gold production of 16.1 grams of gold per tonne.
TerraX Minerals president Joe Campbell recently visited Yellowknife following recent positive results showing gold values as high as 94.9 grams of gold per tonne. By comparison, the Con Mine produced more than 6.1 million ounces of gold at an average grade of 16.1 grams of gold per tonne. - Elaine Anselmi/NNSL photo
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However, president Joe Campbell recently told Yellowknifer the company is still very far from going into the production stage of a mine.
"We're not in a stage where we're even contemplating development of the project to a mining level," he said. "That's still several years from us."
Campbell was recently in the city to meet with the company's complete board for the first time as well as lead a tour of the site of TerraX's Yellowknife City Gold Project to investors and purveyors of junior mining.
"It's important for people to understand that junior mining is a negative cash-flow business," he said. "We spend money, we don't make it. So we're continually looking for additional funding."
Campbell said his company had been planning this trip for several months and it happened to coincide with the recent announcement of about eight kilometres of staked land on the southern extension of the Yellowknife Greenstone Belt, immediately south of the historic Con Mine.
"It was just fortuitous we had new things to show people," he said.
In a news release, the company said a two-day reconnaissance program on the northeastern third of the 16.7 kilometre square Southbelt property led to more information on 12 structures and 44 grab samples that were collected. Grab samples are a type of sampling that is less accurate but much cheaper than drill sampling, which is the most accurate method of exploration used to determine a site's mineral potential.
Six of these structures that were sampled returned gold values of greater than 0.5 grams per tonne, with a high value of 94.9 grams of gold per tonne.
As a result of the acquisition of the Southbelt property, the total area of the Yellowknife City Gold Project covers approximately 116 square kilometres as of Sept. 23.
While Campbell said the company won't be in need of additional funding until the end of next year, he said TerraX can't wait until then to get people interested and putting in additional investment.
"This tour of the property allows people to touch and feel zones of mineralization that we're exploration and give them a better sense of how we're advancing the project," he said.
Campbell said the costs of arranging these tours to the site in Yellowknife and overseas to places like Singapore (where he will be this week) forms a large part of the company's budget.
"TerraX tends to be very frugal on this side and tries to put most of our money into the project," he said.
Campbell estimated getting the 11 people to the city, feeding and housing them as well as touring the property cost a few tens of thousands of dollars.
Still, he said the costs and the time required were much lower than transporting potential investors to a site like Ekati.
"In our case, we had people fly in on Tuesday and they flew out on Wednesday," he said. "We can be very cheap in terms of getting an effective view of the property."
However, Campbell admitted his trip to Singapore this week was much more expensive, despite it only consisting of himself and two other people.
"We'll probably spend as much on that trip as much as we did on the whole tour here," he said.
Ultimately, even with the recent good news, much of Campbell's job is about being realistic and tempering expectations.
"It's a very uncertain business," he said. "Success is never given. We feel we're on a project that has a better potential than any other project you can think of. Our chance of success is much larger. But it's still exploration."
