When Tyhee Gold Corp. walked away from its gold exploration project north of Yellowknife, it left behind a veritable jackpot of equipment and vehicles.
“A grader, a backhoe, quad, dually pickup, a 15-passenger van, actually a couple of pickups, generators,” said a snowmobiler who spoke to Yellowknifer, listing off items at the camp near Winter Lake, about 90 km north of Yellowknife, he saw when he drove up to check it out.
The snowmobiler asked not to be named out of fear of being wrongfully implicated in any damage caused to the camp.
Tyhee went into receivership last May, but had halted work at the Yellowknife Gold Project (not to be confused with TerraX's Yellowknife City Gold Project) two years prior after running into financial problems.
The company appears to have deserted thousands of dollars of equipment, said the snowmobiler, plus a bunk house complete with beds and blankets, a full kitchen with utensils and dry goods, freezers, barbeques, TVs, DVD players and skidoos.
Though seemingly left to rot and rust, all that stuff does have an owner.
Vancouver-based GoldMining Inc. announced last spring it had bought 100 per cent of the Yellowknife Gold Project for an unspecified amount.
The purchase included a winterized camp with a 50-person capacity and fuel storage.
“The camp was put in at quite a large expense,” GoldMining CEO Garnet Dawson said Tuesday.
“We bought the asset, and the asset came with the camp and storage facilities and what have you, so now we own that.”
Dawson said when he visited last August, the project and the camp were in a state of good repair.
“The plan would be to go back in this summer just to review that there's been no vandalism or anything like that over the winter,” he said.
If that happens, Dawson may not be thrilled by what he finds.
The snowmobiler said someone had taken an ax to the padlock on the main office and left it wedged in the door.
“It looked very creepy,” said the snowmobiler, who compared the sight to a scene from the movie, The Shining.
“Obviously people had been there, all the doors were all open,” said the snowmobiler, adding that the snow bore tracks from previous snowmobiles.
It's unclear when GoldMining will begin exploration on the Yellowknife Gold Project.
Dawson said the company does not intend to start an active drill program this summer.