The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Continued from pg. 8 Both were related to the change in the weather and involved slips and falls on the site. 'It was a rude awakening to just how quickly really unfortunate things can happen,' said Proctor. 'On the other hand, the group has done phenomenally well, because with all the steel work, concrete, and everything that we've done and to only have two LTA's due to slips and falls.' Nevertheless, the project just celebrated its 88-day mark with no LTAs. With everything else falling into place, talk always comes round to grade and tonnage. Will it be there? Will it be easy to access? Will it be as big and rich as we first thought? All great questions and geologists like Darren Simms are only too eager to answer. Looking over the latest underground drill core with Proctor, they both agree it is spectacular. 'Get used to it; we are going to be hitting this all the time,' said Simms. 'You just don't see rocks like this everywhere. This is some pretty spectacular geology.' Simms says that once they spin their drilling around and start looking at the gold, he has confidence that it to, will be amazing. 'Surprises' 'These rocks are 1.8 billion years old,' he explains. 'This is a huge alteration system. There are lots of complexities going on in here. We could drill the hell out of it and still have some surprises. There is lots of folding and that's going to bring joy and it's going to bring sadness. The joy is the thickening partsÉ it is an ore body on a different scale; a huge ore body.' 'The largest one that HudBay has discovered from what I call a pre-development phase,' Proctor concurs. 'North and South Main ended up being 65 million tons, but when they started off, the reserve base was probably less than a million, which was the open pit. This one is starting at 30 million tons, before we put a hole into it.' Simms is also convinced that Lalor won't be the last of the Snow Lake mines. 'We'll find more, the only thing I can't tell you is how big they are and what the grade is,' he said assuredly. 'That's not arrogance; we've just got such a good land package. That's been the hammer here. Hudbay has a great land package, they know what they're doing, know the procedures that work, and away you goÉ you just kinda chip away at it. 'Consistent funding and consistent people is what works. The biggest hurdle will be for the town to grow with the deposit. I've lived here, I know the hurdles. But it is a good problem to have.' My Take on Snow Lake runs Fridays.
