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Dryden claims stake in exploration

The City of Dryden is hopping on the exploration bandwagon in a big way.

The City of Dryden is hopping on the exploration bandwagon in a big way.

After landing a junior miner this past summer to search for gold on an unused piece of municipal property, the city wants to get more companies into an area of northwestern Ontario that's been largely unexplored for generations.

The economic development corporation is working on an online mineral resource guide (www.exploredryden.ca) for prospectors and exploration firms on what labour, products and services are offered in the area. The aim is to make Dryden a mining service hub for the region.

Though the city stands to gain financially from an option agreement they signed in June, along with a bunch of other private landowners, city councillor Mike Wood wants the bigger spinoffs on the mining supply side to help augment the region's struggling forest industry.

"Exploration is a business onto itself. Whether there's a mine is not the issue. The fact that this area is being seriously looked at for the first time in generations can't help but have a positive impact on the economy."

Pulp and paper production has long been an economic staple of the community of 8,200.

"For far too long this town has been single industry and anything we can do to diversify the economy is exactly what we need to do," says Wood.

The Ontario Geological Survey lists 55 companies that have active programs or properties staked in the Kenora District, which includes Dryden. Many have arrived just in the last year.

The city decided to stake its own claim in the exploration frenzy.

In a smart economic development idea to attract explorationists, the city joined up with a group private land owners to assemble a consolidated land package inside a highly prospective former gold camp. The 1,100-hectare mix of city and private-owned land in Van Horne Township on the city's outskirts is on the spot of two closed-up, shallow gold mines.

Infrastructure-wise, the Trans-Canada Highway is eight kilometres to the north and a paved secondary highway runs through part of the Van Horne properties.

The city compiled all the historic geological data and mailed them out to interested juniors to solicit proposals. Laurentian Goldfields emerged from a shortlist of 10 companies.

"It shows some heads-up thinking," says company president/CEO Andrew Brown, who gave the municipality and the project's lead, councillor Wood, high marks for their approach.

"We get a project that's already put together. The review of the data was easy, it was a concise report and everything was available digitally," says Brown.

"Starting from scratch, assembling this (land package) and doing seven different deals going in there would've been hellish. The legwork that Dryden did was fantastic."

Laurentian signed option agreements with the city and the private land owners to acquire the properties in return for a four-year commitment to spend $1.6 million in exploration.

As part of the deal to earn 100 per cent interest in each of the seven properties, Laurentian will pay out $311,250 to the property vendors over a four-year period, including 967,000 in common shares.

The company further added six nearby clnt opportunities.