A Vancouver gold startup company believes a former northwestern Ontario mining camp in the Kashabowie area has high-grade, open-pit mining potential.
Goldshore Resources released a mineral resources estimate this fall for its Moss Lake Gold Project, 100 kilometres west of Thunder Bay, which the company envisions could host multiple open-pit operations.
Goldshore has taken a fresh approach to an area that has been heavily explored and mined for gold and base metals by a string of companies since the turn of the last century.
Last month, Goldshore released an inferred mineral resource estimate for its Moss Lake deposit showing 4.17 million ounces of gold at 1.1 grams per tonne with high grade sheer zone of 2.2 million ounces at 2.0 grams per tonne.
The company maintains there’s huge exploration upside and expects the resource will expand over time into a “significant, Tier 1, open-pit development.”
In talking about its open-ended gold potential, Goldshore CEO Brett Richards said in a Nov. 15 town hall webinar with shareholders that “building a big mining camp, I think, is inevitable.”
They certainly can’t complain about the location. Highway 11 comes with a kilometre of the 14,292-hectare property.
Goldshore acquired the project from Wesdome Gold Mines in the middle of last year.
They picked up two existing deposits – Moss Lake and East Coldstream – with an historic estimate of 1,473,700 ounces of indicated gold and inferred resources of 2,514,876 ounces of gold.
The project also features the former North Coldstream Mine in the Burchell Lake area, which once produced 103 million pounds of copper, 44,000 ounces gold and 440,000 ounces of silver.
Goldshore raised $50 million to launch its own exploration program and set about drilling to verify and confirm that historic resource. Goldshore is now on in the back end of a100,000-metre drilling program started in the summer of 2022.
The new mineral estimate is only a partial snapshot of what Moss Lake potentially holds, the company said. Goldshore said they’re still waiting on assay results from the lab on the remaining 52 holes, stoking their optimistic that gold resources will grow significantly over the next few months.
This fall, the company is trickling out the latest batches of assay results. A Nov. 28 news release shows more high-grade drill hits that Richards said will be compiled into their work for a preliminary economic assessment in 2023, assessing the potential for a mine.
Goldshore claims they’ve intersected gold in all its drill holes along an eight-kilometre-long trend and see it expanding to 11 kilometres once the results from their summer sampling program come in.
They envision a series of open-pit mines that could be joined with more intensive drilling. An airborne magnetic survey of the entire property produced close to 30 gold targets that they’re eager to follow up on in a next phase of drilling in 2023.
Goldshore said it maintains a strong commitment to ESG (Environmental, social, and corporate governance) principles and have signed exploration agreements with First Nation communities in the area.
