Resource World Magazine

O C T O B E R / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7 www.resourceworld.com 41 which has been dismantled and removed from the property. On August 23, 2017, Nighthawk issued a press release saying that the company had reported 9,000 of the 26,000 metres of drilling that it planned to complete this year, before shutting down the camp for the winter. Drilling has focused on extending high- grade mineralization in Zone 1.5, located north of one of the open pits mine that was in production during the Royal Oak years. Preliminary metallurgical results suggest that the project could be amenable to conventional milling techniques with gold recoveries of up to 96%. Tests on low- grade material also demonstrated favourable results using the heap leach recovery meth- ods that Kinross has deployed at its Fort Knox open pit mine in Alaska. Bryon said he has no plans to take the project all the way to production. "I am not a miner,'' he said. The Toronto-based geologist said his expertise lies in finding overlooked opportunities like Colomac and taking them to a stage where there is a clear path to development and production. While Nighthawk still has a lot of work to do to achieve that goal, it hopes that plans to extend a gravel highway west of Yellowknife from Hwy 3 to the com- munity of Wahti will help to improve project economics by making it more accessible. Construction on the new sec- tion is expected to begin at the end of 2018, said N.W.T. Industry and Tourism Minister Wally Schumann. Meanwhile, TerraX Minerals is tak- ing a similar approach after staking out a highly prospective district scale land position on the doorstep of the City of Yellowknife, close to the former Giant Mine, which was once owned by Royal Oak and produced 7 million ounces of gold from 1948 to 2004. The Yellowknife City gold project is made up of three properties that cover 382 km 2 , an area that has histor- ically produced 15 million ounces of gold. Aston Bay Holdings is another junior which has decided that the challenges asso- ciated with Arctic exploration are a small price to pay for the opportunities in the region. That would include Aston Bay's flag- ship Storm Project in Nunavut where the company has targeted large sediment hosted copper and/or zinc deposits typically found in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo. The company is currently conduct- ing airborne geophysical surveys in a bid to establish targets for drilling next year. In an interview, CEO, Thomas Ullrich, said he was excited by the amount of copper found on surface as well as by results of drill- ing in four zones of copper mineralization. That includes 110 metres grading 2.45% copper from surface at the 2750N Zone. "You don't come across these sorts of things very often in a career," he said. Ullrich says the lack of previous explo- ration in the area is a huge incentive for companies like Aston Bay. "That is why the opportunity is still there,'' he said. n

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