PROFILE: A striking mission at Silver Queen
COMMUNITY: Houston geocachers find the travel bug PAGE 12
PAGE 6
WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, 2012
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New Nadina talks rocks By Andrew Hudson Houston Today
VACSTC photo by Wayne Emde
CADET Clean-up
Cadets Jonathan Jaspers of the Houston corps, centre, carries one of the hundreds of logs, branches, and other pieces of debris that blocked access to the beaches of Mara Lake at Swansea Point south of Sicamous, B.C. See page 12 for more details.
At the Silver Queen site south of Houston, not all that glitters is gold. But if mineral explorers find what they’re looking for, it may be copper, silver, molybdenum and other metals. Ellen Clements, president of New Nadina Explorations Ltd, met Houston councillors and Chamber of Commerce members last week to explain the company’s future exploration plans for the Silver Queen site. Since 2008, New Nadina has spent $4 million exploring Silver Queen for a porphyry—the type of large mineral deposit needed to start a bulktonnage mine. After years of drilling to nothing but veins, last September New Nadina finally found to the porphyry that may be their
“ “It’s people like you that are driving this economy.”
- Bill Holmberg
source. Still, Clements said, the company has a long ways to go. “If you look at 4,000 targets, you may get 20 that get to the stage of making a mine,” she said. “We’re still not at that stage, far from it.” New Nadina is now filing a five-year Notice of Work plan with the B.C. Ministry of Mines. The next step, Clements said, is expanding the “postage stamp” 200- by 300-metre area where New Nadina last did geophysics studies. See NADINA on Page 2
Skeena sockeye forecast jumps to 2.2 million after tests at Tyhee By Andrew Hudson Houston Today
Skeena fishermen caught some good news last week—this year’s sockeye salmon run is much larger than expected. Before returning sockeye started to enter the lower Skeena River in June,
the Department of Fisheries and Oceans forecast a run of about 1.4 million. But that forecast rose to roughly 2.2 million once the DFO started to catch and count returning sockeye at its Tyhee test fishery. “Luckily for us, not only is it coming
in larger, it’s coming in significantly larger than our Tyhee tests to date,” says Dale Gueret, chief resource manager for the DFO’s north coast area. Since 1955, the DFO has used its Tyhee test fishery—a gillnetting boat that fishes with a net of fixed size at set times of day—to esti-
mate how many pink and sockeye salmon escape the commercial fisheries along the Alaskan and northern B.C. coast. Last year, about 1.9 million sockeye made the trip. Today, more than three-quarters of Skeena sockeye return to the Babine-
Nilkitkwa lake system. At 500 square kilometres, it is the largest natural lake in B.C. and home to two manmade spawning channels. One, at Fulton River south of Granisle, is the world’s largest sockeye channel, spawning some
500,000 fish every September. Gueret says it can be tough to balance the success of those enhanced runs against wild ones. Some, like the Kitwanga River run near Hazelton, have been fished by first nations for thousands of years, he said, but are
now seriously weakened. “There you see the problem,” Gueret said. “You can have lots of surplus coming from an enhanced facility, but it’s timing in with a run that’s not as strong and can’t withstand the same pressure.” See SALMON on Page 2