160 Terrace Review — Wednesday, November 6, 1991

| by Michael Kelly

——
—————

While drills and geologists probe Eskay Creek, road builders have bridged
the Iskut River and are opening up the remote valley for industrial
transportation. The crews have gone as far as Volcano Creek, where the road

t the end of August the
atmosphere at Belt IL was cool
and humid. Fog and low cloud,
dropping spatters of rain drifted
through the tree tops.

The base manager at Northern
Mountain Helicopters, peering
from the door of the trailer that
houses the flying company’s
base at the outpost, said it was
fine weather for flying.

Pilot Ernie Sande guided the
freshly fuelled Hughes 500 heli-
copter tentatively over the unfor-
giving terrain of rock and
swamp, following the contours
of mountains and declivities
marked by creeks, seeking a way
through the mist that allowed
him to keep in sight of ground
while getting us to our destina-
tion, one of the biggest gold
discoveries in North American
history. Eskay Creek.

A short 20 minutes west of
Highway 37 by air, Eskay would
take forever to reach by land.
The camp buildings straggle in
an undulating line across a
mountain top surrounded by
peaks that go on past the horizon
in all directions, the layout of
the camp following the capri-
cious line of Eskay Creek itself,
which burbles  vivaciously
through the site. Settling down
on a plywood pad, the helicopter
is met by Peter Busse, the burly,
energetic mine manager whose
job is to run this operation while
the geologists try 1o make sense
out of an ore body that baffled
prospectors for decades.

The air is clear and invigorat-
ing at this altitude, and filled
with the predatory throbbing of
helicopters approaching and
receding. Sande’s chopper. lifts
off the pad and whistles up to
the edge of cloud-obscured ridge
(whoops, not that way/), pauses,
drops, heads up to another exit
from the shallow mountaintop
declivity that holds the camp,
and abruptly vanishes over a
boulder-strewn peak into the

will go south to the Eskay camp.

The decision whether to put Eskay Creek into production
will not be made until the spring of 1992, when Interna-
tional Corona and Placer Dome have completed and pon-
dered their feasibility study. But Peter Steen, president and
chief executive officer of International Corona and a board
director for Prime Resources, will be surprised if it doesn’t
become a producing mine.

Steen said from Vancouver last weck.

Steen noted the richness and uniqueness of the Eskay ore
body, adding that everything, including construction of the
resource road, seems to be going according to plan at the
remote Northwest site.

The company will be compiling and examining informa-
tion from the summer program at Eskay over the winter,
gradually rolling it into a feasibility study. Metallurgical
testing is still being done on drill corcs, Steen said, but
added that the results will form part of the feasibility study
and won't be released to the public until the feasibility

Corona, Placer ready to go
if the numbers come up right

study is finished and released. “It’s an enormous amount of
work,” he said. .

financing arrangements against the eventuality that Eskay

mist.

After several months of attempting to make forward

=e —
—

"I’m very optimistic about it. It’s very unlikely not to go,”

would go into production, Corona finally struck a deal in
September with Placer Dome. Placer agreed to spend $240
million to build the mine in exchange for half ownership of
it. Corona will be the operator after the mine is built, and
any development expenses incurred after the initial $240
million investment by Placer will be split 50-50 by the two

‘partners.

Placer’s half will include $110 million already spent to
acquire a 22 percent interest in the property through its
holdings in Stikine Resources. In a complex cross-hatching
of indirect holdings in Prime Resources and Stikine, Placer
and Corona will each effectively control 50 percent of
Eskay.

At current prices the value of probable gold reserves at
Eskay. is over $1 billion, and the mine is expected to be a —
low-cost producer.

~_ | Thousands of drills have

Busse leads the way along a
rambling boardwalk of rough
planks that connects the camp
buildings to our first stop, a
wood frame building with a
steeply pitched roof. The air is
full of moisture laden with a
sharp metallic smell. Intermit-
tently the high whine of a
power-driven rock saw emanates
from a closed room next to the

‘door.

In the far corner a geologist
under bright, hot lights carefully
arranges tubular drill core
samples in wood boxes on a
slanted table, attaches a label to
each, and then photographs each
box of samples. This record
matches the eventual assay
results, done by a lab in
Vancouver, to the location where
it came out of the ground, allow-
ing the geologists to follow the
underground twistings and turn-
ings of the ore body. Off in
another corner a young woman,
doing her master’s thesis for a
UBC geology degree, mulls over
a pile of shattered rock. Busse,
opening the door to the closed
room, discloses the back of a
man entirely enveloped in rain
gear, raising a mist of water and
rock dust as he slices each core
like a mottled salami into a
variety of specified lengths.

Outside again, Busse points out
an agglomeration of open-walied
sheds filled with racked flat
boxes of core samples, a con-
tained history of the exploration
work and a sort of reference
map to the underground mys-
teries of the site. All-terrain
vehicles, small gas electric gen-
erators and a misceliany of other
equipments sits idly on the mud
and rock ground, The sun wades
out of the fog briefly to put the
machines in sharp relief and a
helicopter suddenly roars over-
head.

hen Busse took over
the operation, he explains on the
way back to the main part of the
camp, he became concerned
about the number of small, indi-
vidual diesel generators being
used to heat camp buildings and
bunkhouses. As we walk up to
main generator building, emit-

__ ting its muffled day-in, day-out
- roar, he says he decided to put

the entire Camp on one generat-
ing system to confine fuel
spillage to one area. He points
out improvements to the main
fuel tank, involving the installa-
tion of filler neck designed to
contain spills — the tank has to
be filled from a giant rubber
bladder suspended from a hover-
ing helicopter — and a concrete
bermed foundation for the tank
to confine spills below.

He is a hiker and an outdoors-
man who considers himself an
environmentalist. He met his .
wife, he recalls, at a hearing into

the plan to locate a hazardous

waste dump near Caclie Creek;

~~ she -was’ a council diembér “of”