Courageous Lake continues to grow for Seabridge Gold

Drilling last year to upgrade inferred resources to higher categories at Seabridge Gold‘s (SEA-T) Courageous Lake deposit northeast of Yellowknife, has increased measured and indicated resources, improved the average grade, and boosted the size of the deposit, the company says. A revised preliminary assessment will be out in April.

The updated resource incorporated data from 49 diamond drill holes totaling about 22,000 metres. Using the same cut-off grade as the 2007 resource model, measured and indicated gold resources increased by 60%, while the average grade of these categories improved by 5%. Most of that gain came from upgrading previously defined inferred resources to measured or indicated categories. The 2010 drilling also discovered new inferred resources and increased the average grade in that category by 13% from the 2007 estimate.

Courageous Lake’s updated measured and indicated resources now stand at 90.16 million tonnes grading 2.34 grams gold per tonne for 6.78 million oz. contained gold, with inferred resources adding 63.05 million tonnes of 2.24 grams gold or 4.54 million oz. contained gold.

The cutoff grade was set at 0.83 gram gold per tonne, consistent with the cut-off grade used for the previous Courageous Lake resource estimates. Seabridge notes that the cut-off grade that used in the 2011 PA likely will be lower than 0.83 gram per tonne due to higher gold prices.

“The new resource model and a substantially higher gold price should significantly enhance project economics in the April 2011 PA,” the company asserted in a news release. The 2008 PA was based on a gold price of US$690 per oz. That PA outlined an 11.6 year mine life with average annual production of 500,000 ounces of gold at average cash costs of US$435 per oz. and initial capital costs of US$848 million.

In total the new resource model is based on a total of 560 holes drilled by Seabridge, Noranda and Placer Dome totaling 150,584 meters.

Gold mineralization at Courageous Lake is hosted in the upper part of an assemblage of Archean age felsic pyroclastic rocks, just below a transition zone to volcanoclastic and sedimentary rocks.

Courageous Lake is about 240 km northeast of Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories and lies in a historic mining district. The property, which covers about 27,113 hectares, can be accessed year-round either by air at the airstrip at the former Salmita mine, 6 km to the south of the property, or by a winter road.

Gold was first discovered in the area in 1936.

In Toronto Seabridge Gold is currently trading at $27.94 per share. Over the last year it has traded between a low of $21.28 on March 23 2010 and a high of $40 on May 26 2010. The company has about 41.1 million shares outstanding.