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| Bralorne Mine: Sleeping Giant Awakens |
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| Friday, 03 October 2008 | |||
 If a new segment of Bralorne Gold Mines’ BK zone proves economic, the mill is set to operate following a more than $9 million rebuilding effort.
The gold in the photo comes from the company’s 2006 Bonanza drill hole. Put down in an intriguing area of the property missed by early miners, it graded more than 11 ounces of gold per ton across an intersection about a foot wide. It’s just the sort of rich pocket the mine, which produced more than 4 million ounces of gold between 1932 and 1971, thrived on. At one time the three main operations here – Bralorne, Pioneer and King – supported a bustling town of 10,000 and provided hundreds of jobs at the height of the Depression. The mines closed when the price of gold stalled at around $35 per ounce. The modern-day Bralorne Gold Mines Ltd. has been acquiring ground there over the past decade, and it is the sole owner of the whole show. In fact, it’s the first time in history that one company has owned all three operations and the important surrounding claims. Which relates directly to the other essential item on Kocken’s desk, the technical report. Preliminary Assessment Update isn’t a title one would be drawn to pick up and read on a plane. But this detailed document, prepared by Beacon Hill Consultants of Vancouver, lays out a number of specific steps and procedures, along with reams of data, all directed at bringing the Bralorne mine back into production as quickly as possible. And, with gold threatening to break through $900 an ounce, the timing is just about perfect. Beacon Hill calculated that, with a price of just $500 an ounce, the mine could re-open, provided Bralorne could locate 500,000 tons of ore grading 0.35 ounces of gold – about 12 grams per ton. Recent discoveries by Bralorne indicate there’s plenty of gold to be found. The biggest challenge has been solving the puzzle of the area’s complex veins and geology. “You could sum up that whole report in just six words,” Kocken says, pointing at the document: “drill for structure; drift for grade.” It’s an old hard-rock miner’s maxim that, in layman’s terms, means the gold puzzle at Bralorne is tough to solve – even if there’s a lot of it and the historic grades rank among the highest in the world. You can drill holes into the side of the mountain until it looks like Swiss cheese. You can run computer analyses. You can set up 3-D block imagery and look at it from a hundred different perspectives. But in the end, you won’t really know how much gold is there until you start digging it out. “That’s what they did in the mine’s heyday,” Kocken says. “They really never had more than a year’s worth of ore blocked out ahead of time. They just kept going because they kept hitting these rich veins. And because the gold veins are narrow, and they pinch and swell, a series of drill holes might miss a key zone by an inch, or even a fraction of an inch, and you’d never know it.” So, the exploratory drill holes tell geologists what sort of rocks are beneath them, and maybe a bit about how the rocks have moved around over the eons and hopefully turn up some intriguing hits of gold. But the real work of finding yellow metal in these deposits is usually done by digging tunnels and assaying what comes out of them. Drilling at Bralorne in 2006, following up on the rich Bonanza hole, the company encountered a surprising number of good grades and, even more importantly, the kinds of structures that let geologists know they were in what miners like to call “elephant country.” As part of their phase two program in 2007, Bralorne went underground on the old King Mine drift and drilled 42 holes into the newly discovered target – now called the BK zone because it occurred in the unexplored gap between the Bralorne and King mines. “Of course, those are also my initials,” Kocken says with a grin. The results to date in the Bralorne-King (BK) zone have been impressive. Nearly every hole has encountered gold – up to 4.195 ounces per ton over two feet – and the gold-hosting structure appears substantial. So Bralorne has now moved into phase three, an aggressive stage that has included both a 310-foot cross-cut to the new BK zone and drifting into the BK zone that has yielded results of 0.842 ounces of gold per ton, more than 134 feet followed by 0.525 ounces of gold per ton, and more than 81 feet with mineable widths ranging from 5.45 to 4.0 feet. The ultimate goal of phase three is to gather enough information for an updated resource calculation. What gets Kocken truly excited about phase three is the likelihood of locating more zones. “There could be a number of parallel structures in there, just like the BK,” he says. “Remember, this part of the property was never explored, yet it contains the same sort of rocks and geology as the old Bralorne and King mines. Discovering the BK zone is a huge factor in our favor, because history tells us there should be more like it.” If this new segment of the property proves economic, the mill is set to operate. All permits are in place, the plant is operational with bulk sampling completed, the camp is ready and the area has ample labor. Beacon Hill’s recommendations call for a milling rate of 280 tons per day. Following more than $9 million spent on rebuilding, the mill is ready to process about 100 tons per day. “Ramping up to 280 will be a relatively easy step,” Kocken says. “There’s ample room in the plant building, our tailings pond was built for 500 tons per day, and much of the equipment is already in place to expand.” The new era at Bralorne includes much more than exploring new ground. At the time of shutdown, a lot of high-grade gold remained in the old mine workings and was well documented. And local lore says there was plenty left undocumented. “As long as the price of gold stays high,” says Kocken, “our opportunities here are pretty much unlimited.” |
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