By IAN ROSS
The City of Dryden expects to land a mineral exploration company shortly to begin work this year on a package of assembled properties in an old gold mining camp.
The municipality and a junior miner were putting the final touches on an agreement that would open up exploration on a vacant 2,000-acre parcel of both city- and private-owned land in Van Horne Township on Dryden's outskirts.
City councillor Mike Wood would not disclose the identity of the company until they had completed their TSX filings.
He says they're an experienced team that's been involved with major gold corporations on big mine projects in Ontario. The city will have an option agreement with the company to pick up royalties should the package of properties ever go into production.
"We're doing things differently than typical exploration work," says Wood, who's overseeing the city's geoscience mapping initiative.
Instead of a prospector or junior miner staking a claim, going out to do some grass roots fieldwork, assembling a large land package and then notifying neighbouring communities and First Nations when something substantive is discovered, the City of Dryden has opted to do the opposite.
Through their own consulting geologist, the city has identified and assembled the land package, brought in Aboriginal leaders from Grand Council Treaty 3 for consultation, and then solicited interest from exploration companies to come forward.
"It's basically a template for how to do business," says Wood. "It's backward to the way industry has approached it."
It's a more positive partnership and a co-operative approach.
The city has been promoting the area as a largely untapped gold resource that was last mined more than 80 years ago. All of the area's 16 past producing shafts were dug before 1930 and none extended beyond 300 feet.
The Ontario Geological Survey lists 55 companies that have active programs or properties staked for base metals, gold, uranium, molybdenum, even diamonds, in the Kenora District, which includes Dryden.
Many of the properties have had previous exploration and some extraction over the years, but juniors are back in there as mineral prices remain high.
"The increase (in activity) in this neck of the woods has been through the roof," says Wood. "No one's done any serious exploration in this area for generations."
For a community that's been heavily reliant on forestry for decades, diversification into mining is an important component of Dryden's economic strategy.
The Dryden area has often been overlooked and hasn't been explored in any great detail. The Kenora District's resident government geologist Craig Ravnaas says it has always been a mystery as to why there hasn't been more activity in Dryden.
Canadian Arrow has the area's most advanced project. The Sudbury junior is planning to build an open pit nickel-copper mine on its Kenbridge deposit near Sioux Lookout by 2010. The development would bring with it 150 mining jobs and generate more than $100 million in construction.
Ravnaas says it's only been in the last year that there's been a surge of drilling work. "It was just a matter of time before someone realized there were really good mineral showings. It was not one property that spurred it, but everything kicked in at once."
It was not gold at first, but uranium and molybdenum.
MPH Ventures picked up its Pidgeon Molybdenum Deposit near Dryden at Lateral Lake and completed some drilling to determine the historical numbers on it.
Previously, Rio Algom and Strathcona Mineral Services identified an historic mineral resource in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Historical reports indicate the contained tonnage ranged between 9,000,000 tonnes grading at 0.096 per cent molybdenum to as much as 55 million tonnes at 0.081 per cent.
Most of the activity in the Wabigoon Lake area of Dryden is gold focused.
Sudbury's Tamaka Gold Corp. acquired the Golden Mine just south of the MPH's property. It was worked on very briefly in the 1950s and 1980s with some tonnage identified and mined. After going through stages of rehabilitation, the company picked up the property and decided to continue exploration.
East of Dryden, Treasury Metals is working a high-grade gold deposit known as the Goliath project on its Thunder Lake property.
The company, a spinoff of Laramide Resources, has drill rigs turning to define and confirm an historical mineral resource of 2.97 million tonnes grading 6.47 grams per tonne gold. The deposit may also contain silver and base metals.
One of the few veteran explorers in the area has been Champion Bear Resources which has been drilling off the Plomp Farm gold property for a couple of years between Dryden and Vermillion Bay.
Ravnaas says the area's geology is structurally complex. In gold exploration, companies are looking for quartz veins.In the Kenora area, compared to more established camps like Red Lake, there's only a few diamond drill holes that have penetrated down 1,000 feet.
Most of the area has been drilled off for the near-surface extensions of quartz veins.
"They haven't really gone down very deep in the ground in the three-dimensional world."
Most of what lies deep down is untouched. Many companies are referring back to historical drill logs written during the Second World War to find areas of known tonnage. But there's always new ideas and concepts that can be applied to untouched ground, says Ravnaas.
The entire northwest is warming to the prospects of what mineral exploration could bring to the region.
Treaty 3 and the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines held a joint workshop this past spring in Kenora with invitations sent to junior exploration firms to give public presentations on their activity in the area.
