The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Loads of mineral samples overwhelm bevy of new, expanded prep labs by mid-season; Ryan spurs Acme to build new facility in Dawson
DAWSON CITY - "Assays are pending" seems to be the three most common words uttered by companies exploring the mineral-rich lands of Canada's Northwest. After a weeklong trek through Yukon Territory, it is easy to see why.
All across this hotbed of mineral exploration gold seekers are applying the "Shawn Ryan technique" of collecting close-spaced (typically 50-meter) grid soil samples to identify gold and other minerals associated with the precious metal. These extensive geochemical programs have resulted in hundreds of thousands of soil samples being delivered to the handful of assay labs that service the region.
Ryan told Mining News in August that Ground Truth Exploration, a company he formed, will collect around 185,000 soil samples in 2011.
While this vast volume of soil samples alone would be enough to keep the assay labs busy, the success of numerous such geochemical surveys are lighting up drill targets all across territory.
A quick tally of the top 10 exploration projects in the Yukon Territory reveals around 270,000 meters of drilling planned for 2011, and adding in the smaller programs, the total will likely surpass 350,000 meters.
New prep labs
In attempt to stay ahead of the enormous quantity of soil, core and rock samples being generated in the Yukon, companies conducting assays and geochemical analysis have opened several new preparation laboratories in the territory.
Prep labs - as they are more commonly referred to in the industry - dry, crush and reduce samples before shipping them to central laboratories for fire assays and other geochemical analysis.
Acme Analytical Laboratories Ltd. opened such a facility in Whitehorse at the beginning of 2010.
Acme said the ISO9001-certified laboratory can prepare 2,000 to 4,000 samples per day for shipment to its central laboratory in Vancouver, British Columbia.
ALS Minerals, the geochemical analysis division of ALS Laboratories Group, opened its own ISO9001-certified prep lab in Yukon's capital city in May 2010. By August of this year, ALS said it had doubled the capacity of the facility.
Gerald Chik, the interim branch manager at the ALS Minerals Whitehorse preparation facility, told Mining News that some 6,000 to 7,000 samples a week are being processed at the expanded lab before being forwarded to Vancouver, B.C. for analysis.
Inspectorate Exploration & Mining Services and AGAT Laboratories are two other geochemical testing firms that have set up shop recently in Whitehorse.
Whitehorse bottleneck
Though these analytical firms have rushed to expand their capacity to keep pace with the territory's exponential exploration growth, they are backlogged by the enormous loads of dirt and rock being delivered to their prep labs from projects all across the Yukon.
"I think they crunched their numbers at the start of the year, but it still caught them by surprise," said Kaminak Gold Corp. Vice President of Exploration Tim Smith. "Of course, everyone is here at once, going hard, and producing a lot of samples - which hits the labs in one big shot and overwhelms them."
Kaminak said it has waited upwards of six weeks to get assay results from its 40,000-meter drill program at the Coffee Project in the White Gold District.
In an Aug. 9 update that highlights a four-meter intercept in hole CFD-90 that averages 74.9 grams of gold per metric ton, Kaminak said assays are pending from another 109 holes drilled at Coffee this year.
Smith said the drill core and reverse circulation samples from the Coffee project are now being shipped directly to the ALS Minerals laboratory in Vancouver, B.C.
Ironically, by bypassing the bottleneck in much-closer Whitehorse, Kaminak is seeing a quicker turnaround on its assay results.
Dawson lab
While Kaminak ships its drill samples to ALS Minerals, all of its soil samples are being assayed by Acme. In fact, all soil samples taken from any of the properties that Ryan has generated are processed by this company.
Ryan, who is now president of Ryan Gold Corp., told Mining News that he has used the same analyzing protocols and sent samples to the same lab for the past eight years.
Using a constant methodology - from how the soil samples are collected in the field to the sampling parameters used in the Acme lab - provides Ryan with a consistent database across all of the properties in which he is involved. This allows the prospector-turned-junior-exec to look for subtle similarities or differences in geochemistry that could help guide exploration.
To facilitate all the samples that Ground Truth and others are collecting in the area, Ryan convinced Acme to establish a prep lab in Dawson City. This new facility, which was finished in June, can handle nearly 2,500 samples per day.
Situated in the Klondike and about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of the heart of the White Gold District, Dawson City is a logistical center for the enormous amount of exploration going on here.
Ryan said the turnaround early in the season for results of samples routed through Acme's Dawson lab was about two and a half weeks, but recently has slowed to about one month.
While this year's soil-sampling program in the Yukon appears to be the biggest on the planet, Ryan says Ground Truth Exploration crews are already gearing up for an even bigger program next year.
He estimates that Ground Truth will deliver 240,000 soil samples to Acme Labs in 2012, 140,000 of which will be collected on the 50 or more properties that belong to Ryan Gold.
Given Ryan's track record, additional prep labs may be needed to keep pace with the soil samples carted out of the Yukon bush in the future - and the drill programs this massive geochemical endeavor could generate.
Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.
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