Timmins Placer Dome mine manager to tackle open pit California

John Rogers, manager of Placer Dome’s gold mine northeast of Timmins since 1982, is leaving to pursue other mining interests in Vancouver and in the United States.

Rogers will be leaving to become senior vice-president of a relatively new Vancouver-based company called ABM Gold Corp., the offspring of ABM Mining Group.

abm Gold was formed in late 1986, with the first public share offering taking place in April of this year. The new company has a 29.7% interest in Sonora Gold, a Vancouver-based company with an operating gold mine, the Jamestown mine, 125 miles east of San Francisco, Calif. The Jamestown mine is a low grade, open pit operation.

The company also has a 23% interest in Goldenbell Resources, which is applying for a permit, expected by year-end, to bring an open pit gold mine into operation 40 miles south of the Jamestown mine in California. It is expected the Goldenbell operation will go underground in about six years, said Rogers.

abm Gold Corp. holds 39.1% of Vancouver-based United Gold Corp. (vse), which has no operating properties but has some prospects in Idaho and California.

During his years in Timmins and at the mine site, Rogers has steered the mine through some troubled times, but has recently presided over the underground development program that will keep the 2,200- tonne-per-day mill operating at capacity for a long time to come.

“The underground development has not been too bad since July,” he said, “but it has really picked up well in the last couple of months. The first stope should be producing ore this month. In fact, we have already had our first backfill pour.”

Rogers will be replaced as Detour Lake manager by Tim Mann, who has been with the company since April, 1966. Mann is currently manager of operations for the mine.

Exploration activity in and around Timmins has been going on at a feverish pace ever since the advent of the flow-through share method of junior resource financing was introduced. And that exploration activity has already begun to pay dividends.

In 1981, for example, the two major gold mines remaining in the Porcupine camp — Dome Mines and Pamour Porcupine Mines — produced a total of 176,660 oz gold. Just five years later, in 1986, the gold mines of the Porcupine — which still included the Dome and Pamour operations as well as the Detour Lake, Owl Creek and Hoyle Pond mines — produced an impressive 426,200 oz gold.

And the projection for 1987 is for the area mines — which now include those mentioned plus the Bell Creek mine of Canamax Resources and Pamorex Minerals — to produce 512,280 oz, three times the 1981 production.

The feeling around Timmins these days is that this gold production is only going to get better and better — providing the price stays at current or higher levels and provided the federal government doesn’t tamper too much with the popular flow-through method of financing.

Both John Larche, the Timmins resident who heads the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, and Lorne Luhta, resident geologist with the Ministry of Development and Mines, say if the price of gold remains high and flow-throughs are left alone, the Timmins area will continue to boom.

There is still a lot of argument among geologists over whether or not there is any relationship between the gold mineralization found in Timmins and the Porcupine-Destor fault. But Luhta commented it was difficult not to notice the spatial relationship (as opposed to a genetic relationship) that exists between the fault and mines that exist in close proximity to it.

Both the Porcupine-Destor and the Pipestone faults are located in the Abitibi greenstone belt, the largest belt of volcanics and associated sedimentary rock in the Canadian Shield.

The belt stretches from west of Timmins through to Chibougamau, Que., and includes the mining camps of the Porcupine, Val d’Or, Malartic and Rouyn-Noranda, as well as the exploration hot spots of Casa Berardi in Quebec, Harker- Holloway near Matheson, Ont., and the Swayze belt west of Timmins.

There are currently about 56 companies and individuals involved in exploration in the Timmins area alone, said Luhta. As of late 1986, there were 13 major mining companies, 34 junior resource companies and nine “pretty sophisticated individuals” involved in the search for minerals in Timmins, says Luhta.

Among the properties currently undergoing major exploration programs are the old DeSantis mine, currently undergoing an exploration program by Stan West Mines, the Tisdale project of Davidson Tisdale Mines and Getty Resources, the Broulan and Vedron projects of Belmoral Mines, the Clavos deposit of Canamax Resources and the Chester Twp. property of Murgold Resources, near Gogama. Mr Buell is a Timmins journalist.