Eagle Gold Mine tops 10,000 oz production

Victoria Gold Corp. Nov. 25 announced that its Eagle Gold Mine in the Yukon has surpassed 10,000 ounces of gold production.

Construction at Eagle Gold was completed in July and on Sept. 17 Yukon's newest large-scale gold mine poured its first bar.

At the time, Eagle Gold crews had worked 1,720,843 hours without a lost time incident. This would be a stellar achievement for any workforce but is especially noteworthy when you consider this is a newly formed crew and the work it takes to build a mine.

The operations team is continuing to build on this milestone and there has now been 1.85 million consecutive LTI-free hours worked at Eagle Gold.

"The Eagle Gold Mine is enjoying continual and consistent ramp-up of operations. Important objectives recently realized include construction completion, pouring gold and positive cashflow," said Victoria Gold President and CEO John McConnell. "Even with these exceptional milestones achieved, our safety performance is the area I'm most proud of. We have now completed over 1.8 million work-hours lost time accident free. For me, this speaks to the quality of the workforce we've been able to attract and retain."

Roughly 50 percent of this workforce of 300 are Yukon residents, including several citizens from the First Nation of Nacho Nyak Dun, whose traditional territory covers the land where Eagle Gold is located.

Excluding pre-development work, approximately 4.4 million metric tons of material has been mined from the Eagle pit, roughly half of which is ore.

More than 2 million metric tons of the ore mined has been stacked onto the heap leach pad. The remaining 200,000 metric tons of mined ore has been stockpiled and is now being used to accelerate additional ore to the heap leach pad in 2019.

Since the mine's first gold pour just over two months ago, Eagle has produced approximately 13,000 oz of doré containing between 75 and 85 percent gold, and 7 to 18 percent silver. This comes to around 10,400 oz of gold and 1,600 oz of silver poured into the bars so far.

Precious metals are being sold as produced and, based on current production and gold prices, Victoria Gold said its cash inflows from precious metal sales exceeds cash operating costs and sustaining capital.

The company has averaged US$1,480 per oz, or roughly C$1,950/oz, for the Eagle gold it has sold so far.

–SHANE LASLEY