News

May 13, 2008

Kirkland Lake Gold Brings Shiny Lustre Back To A Tired Old Producer

By Rob Davies

It is an axiom of mining that “the old timers didn’t get all the gold”. In practice, most of them made a pretty good job of it, and it’s usually quite hard to find substantial new deposits in old mining camps. That, though, isn’t the case for Kirkland Lake Gold. “Everybody has this idea that Kirkland is a tired old producer”, says Kirkland’s chairman Harry Dobson. “But a mile down and half a mile to the south we have a very large series of orebodies with high grade reserves with big widths”.

For the last few years the company has been exploring and defining the South Mine Complex, which is a totally new zone close to, but separate from, the orebodies that constituted the five mines up at Kirkland Lake that were originally consolidated into one company by Kinross.

The orebodies that were previously exploited here were auriferous quartz veins, whereas the new one is typically richer in sulphides and lies in a feldspar porphyry tuff.  For reasons chief geologist Stuart...