Exploration companies spending $100 million in Nova Scotia

He’s not the only one, but John Dawe of Green Harbour, N.S., exemplifies the tenacity of a true Bluenoser bitten by the gold bug. For him, what’s happening on the gold scene in Nova Scotia is like a dream come true.

One mine (Seabright Resources’ Forest Hill mine) is already in production and has produced some 4,500 oz so far. Another (Seabright’s Beaver Dam mine) is expected to start underground production in the first quarter of 1988. Some 6,000 tons per month are being mined from surface and are being stockpiled. Two other projects, Coxheath Gold Holdings’ Tangier and Northumberland Mines’ Cochrane Hill property, are in the underground stage of exploration with production decisions pending.

And late last month, Northumberland announced plans to take the cap off Canada’s oldest underground hardrock gold mine — the Guysborough mine near Goldenville, N.S. Northumberland plans to dewater and refurbish the shaft in preparation for a possible underground bulk sampling program later this year. The mine produced some 200,000 oz of the yellow metal between 1862 and 1943. Underground projects

At least two other properties have returned such encouraging assay results from surface drilling that their owners are expected to commence underground programs shortly. They include Acadia Mineral Ventures on the Mooseland property and NovaGold Resources and Pan East Resources Inc. at Fifteen Mile Stream.

For the past 20 years Dawe has been pounding the roads in the backwoods of the province, gathering all the geological information he could find to piece together with a wealth of historical geological information gathered from documents as old as 1860 — all to test his ideas on where to find mineable deposits of gold. If, back then, he had the money companies have today, he says, he strongly believes he and his partners could have found the deposits now being explored by others. An estimated $100 million, most of it in flow-through funds, will be spent on gold exploration by some 35 junior exploration companies in the province this year, according to the Chamber of Mineral Resources of Nova Scotia.

With little capital of his own in the 1960s, Dawe pooled his resources with a friend, Alex Thompson and his father-in-law Arnold Summers to form a private company they called Tri-Ex. Over the years, these three Nova Scotians have held a good number of the properties, many of which are now being drilled with good success.

The Forest Hill property, which went into production this year, was one of them. And Acadia Mineral Ventures’ Mooseland property is another.

Although Tri-Ex has not participated directly in flow-through financing, because it is not a public company, Dawe has not been left out in the cold. Besides his property deals with Seabright and Acadia, he regularly sells his technical expertise to both of these companies — giving his advice as assay results come in from their numerous properties scattered throughout the province. Geological Terrain

A chemical engineer by training, Dawe, says there are some very definite temperature, pressure and chemical conditions for forming mineable deposits of gold in Nova Scotia.

“Most of the geologists working for these junior companies,” he says “are starting to think the geology through and are learning what those conditions are — conditions unique to this relatively young geological environment.”

Since most of these exploration geologists are Johnnies-come-lately compared to Dawe, who has been around since the Pleistocene, it seems, he thinks he still has a jump on them.

He had his couriosity sparked many years ago — so long ago he can’t remember exactly when.

He was picking blueberries one summer near his southshore home, he says, sitting on an outcrop under the hot sun, when he happened to notice a slab of sedimentary rock completely surrounded by granitic material. This is interesting, he said to himself, and located the contact and traced it for some distance.

Ever since then he has been fascinated by the interaction of the many igneous plutons which intrude the thick, folded package of sedimentary rocks that cover most of the southwestern and eastern part of Nova Scotia. Known as the Halifax and Goldenville formations, this so-called Meguma Group hosts all of the known occurrences of gold in Nova Scotia — many of which have been mined sporadically between 1860 and 1940.

Combined with the unique structural character of these units, certain areas are more amenable to gold concentrations than others.

It is these areas that are now the subject of both regional and detailed exploration programs by at least 10 publicly traded exploration companies.