The NWT’s long-dormant Mon gold mine will soon be ramping up production further thanks to the completion of a winter road to the site.
On Feb. 16, Sixty North Gold Mining announced that after about four weeks of work, the winter road was finished the previous week but not yet open to traffic.
“We now await gradual thickening of the ice, as temperatures are forecast to remain below -20 C all this week, reaching below -40 C on the coldest nights,” a statement from the company reads.
The 45 kilometre-road starts at Highway 4 and connects to the site north of Yellowknife.
The mine was originally operational from 1989 to 1997, but has been dormant since. As Sixty North president and CEO Dave Webb explained, gold prices in the intervening years made further extraction unfeasible.
“It’s a great way to lose money,” he said.
With gold prices having risen from about $506 per ounce at the beginning of 1997 to about (CAN)$2,308 per ounce at the end of 2021, the mine started extraction again last summer after nearly 25 years.
Now that the winter road is open, “It’ll be bringing in fuel, and it’ll be bringing in some explosives and we might as well tack some lumber on there as well,” said Webb.
These supplies are expected to start moving in March.
Although milling will begin and extraction will be ramping up this year, Webb said the operation will still be modest, moving close to 100 tonnes of material a day with about a dozen workers on site on a typical day.
During its original eight years of operation, the mine produced 15,000 ounces of gold from as many tonnes of ore.
Webb said the mine could extend anywhere from one to nine kilometres below the surface by the time the project is complete. Although he said it’s difficult to estimate how much gold will be produced this time around, a statement from the company stated that the mine’s similarity to the Discovery Mine located farther north — which produced one million ounces of gold at 1.2 kilometres of depth — provides some indication of Mon’s potential yield.
Correction: A previous version of this story had an incorrect figure for the mine's depth. The correct figure is 1.2 km. NNSL Media apologizes for the error.