The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Sorted by date Results 1 - 11 of 11
The last week of May was no ordinary week in Yukon, Canada's most westerly territory. It was Mining and Geology week, and the historic wooden buildings in downtown Dawson City were plastered with brand new white and gold banners. "This Business Supports Placer Mining. Placer Mining Supports This Business," they proclaimed. But the geologists, engineers and biologists spending their days listening to talks at the Palace Grand Theatre and their evenings living it up at Diamond Tooth Gertie's music hall and casino were not in...
Other mining projects may be jumping on the bandwagon, but Teck Cominco still leads the race to find local gas reserves to feed the voracious appetite of a large-mine power plant in Alaska. Seven years after discovering gas deposits in shale near the Red Dog lead/zinc mine, the owner of the huge Northwest Alaska mine is ready to drill a two-well exploration program in hopes of replacing costly diesel fuel it must barge in every year. Though oil companies have developed gas reserves to power production facilities on the North...
As Mining News was going to press on June 15, the U.S. Forest Service announced approval of the modified plan of operations for Coeur Alaska's Kensington Gold Project, an underground gold mine north of Juneau. The mine still needs a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Clean Water Act permit and an Environmental Protection Agency National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Permit which are expected soon, Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski's office said June 15....
The last week of May was no ordinary week in Yukon, Canada's most westerly territory. It was Mining and Geology week, and the historic wooden buildings in downtown Dawson City were plastered with brand new white and gold banners. "This Business Supports Placer Mining. Placer Mining Supports This Business," they proclaimed. But the geologists, engineers and biologists spending their days listening to talks at the Palace Grand Theatre and their evenings living it up at Diamond Tooth Gertie's music hall and casino were not in...
Members of the Tlicho First Nation in Canada's Northwest Territories have played a significant role in the clean-up effort at Colomac mine, participants in the Northern Latitudes Reclamation Workshop heard in May. Colomac is a former open pit gold mine that was operated by Washington state-based Royal Oak Mines until 1997. The company went bankrupt shortly afterwards due to the low price of gold and the Canadian government was left with the bill for reclamation, which could be up to C$50 million. Tlicho families have lived in...
Most people would expect to find Blue, Canadian, Fosters and Moosehead in their local saloon - not up in the hills that surround northern Canada's rugged Dempster Highway. But here at Brewery Creek mine, Yukon, those are some of the names of the eight small open pits that produced more than a few jugs of gold for Vancouver-based Viceroy Resource Corp. between 1996 and 2002. Brewery Creek was one of the northernmost heap leach mines in the world, and it has been the site of numerous successful technological innovations in...
Sawson City, Yukon epitomizes the romance of the Gold Rush, so it was a little surprising that the first field trip arranged as part of this year's Northern Latitudes Reclamation Workshop was to an extremely unglamorous site: the former asbestos mine at Clinton Creek. Quite apart from the lack of allure of its toxic ore, the mine probably doesn't see too many visitors. To reach it from Dawson you have to cross the Yukon on a ferry, drive for almost an hour up the winding Top of the World highway, drive for another hour down...
Reclaiming a mine site is very different from operating a mine, and the staff involved in the reclamation may have limited experience in this kind of work. At the former Faro lead-zinc mine in Canada's Yukon, geotechnical training has been provided so that staff understand more about the purpose of their work and the kinds of specific problems to look out for. Jim Cassie, a geotechnical engineer with BGC Engineering in Calgary, explained the training at the Northern Latitudes Reclamation Workshop in May. Numerous owners...
The right way to do mine reclamation is to start planning it before the mine opens, and long before it closes. That's exactly what is happening at the site of De Beers' proposed Snap Lake diamond mine in Canada's Northwest Territories. The company's board recently approved the project and production is scheduled to start in 2006. Snap Lake will be De Beers' first diamond mine outside Africa and Canada's first fully underground diamond mine. The construction cost will be an estimated C$636 million. "I forget that sometimes, wh...
Tonogold Resources Inc., a California junior mining company, is mounting a gold exploration campaign in Alaska's Kuskokwim River Delta this summer not far from the city of Bethel. The move marks Tonogold's first exploration venture in Alaska and the second gold project in the Kuskokwim delta in recent years. La Jolla-based Tonogold came to Alaska looking for an affordable "company-making property" and wound up signing a 10-year mining lease last month with Calista Corp. to explore the 57,600-acre Nyac gold district about 60 m...
In the waning days of the Klondike Gold Rush, the Arctic tundra far to the north gave birth to another Alaska gold mining legend. Japanese sailor Frank Yasuda left a whaling vessel to make his home among the Inupiat people at Point Barrow. A few years later, disease and hardship had decimated the village of Barrow. Yasuda, an enterprising fellow, and his young Inupiat wife, Eneveloe, joined another explorer in traveling south to the Brooks Mountain Range in search of a new home for the people of Barrow. Near Chandalar Lake...
