Volume 54 Number 51
Friday, December 19, 2014
Thompson, Manitoba
Providing you with expert advice, friendly service, and quality workmanship since 1983. We look forward to serving you. 91-A Kelsey Bay Thompson, MB R8N 1S3 Ph: 204-778-7048 Fax: 204-778-7124
Serving the Norman Region since 1961
Lalor lesson: never stop learning or looking My Take on Snow Lake mjaxon@gillamnet.com
Marc Jackson What could possibly be said of the Lalor deposit that hasn’t already been put forward? It’s been studied and mapped, drilled and surveyed, and looked at from the air and from underground. One would think by now, the ore body would have given up all its secrets. Not so! If one thing was learned from a recent case study of the deposit, it is … you never stop learning or looking. As long as there are people wishing to advance new technologies and learn from the past, knowledge will continue to flow, and the people who search for the answers will bring home the benefits for those of us who choose to live and work here. There were a number of revelations, hunches, and facts put forward at the Lalor Symposium (and a few afterwards in putting this story together). It was a long day of talk about geoscience, geophysics, and general geology, with many of the terms made up of the latter consonants and vowels of the alphabet. But it was all interesting information. Dave Koop, owner and president of Koop Geotechnical, was one of many presenters on this day, and he put forth a few of the facts and revelations. Koop seemed just a bit nervous prior to his presentation during the event … rightfully so; he’s a technician, not a politician. Nevertheless, he performed admirably and got his points across well, while imparting his vast knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the deposit he helped found. Having done an immense amount of research on his topic, Koop imparted it in the fervent and active manner he is noted for. He began with a bit of his own experi-
ence; then moved swiftly into the background of the area. The geotech in him traced mineral exploration in the area back to 1794, when Hudson’s Bay Company (not Hudbay) explorer David Thompson first recognized the unique geology on Reed Lake while wintering near Reed. He followed this up with an overview of the contributions of Billy Todd, Dick Woosey, Mike Hackett, Kate Rice, Joe Kerr, Charlie Krug, and Christopher Parres. Koop also covered some of the early history of the Edwards/Chisel/Lalor area. From his research he found that HBED’s (Hudson Bay Exploration and Development) first foray into the Chisel Basin came in 1939, when they acquired a group of six claims – “Edward” and “Windfall” – through a lawyer from The Pas, Fleet Witaker. These claims had been staked on different occasions by both Joe Kerr and Dick Woosey. Skipping ahead to 1956, HBED did a Boliden EM survey (two hoops, 200 foot cable, four-person crew) around the area of a small lake east of Cook Lake, which at the time was called “Little Cook Lake.” This lake was of course renamed Lalor Lake in 1974. The information gleaned from the Boliden survey apparently warranted more work and three short holes were drilled in the Cook Lake area; one of them at the northwestern edge of the current ore body. They hit graphite. However, that year there were bigger fish to fry slightly south east of “Little Cook.” This happened when the Lost Lake and subsequently the Chisel Lake ore bodies were discovered after drilling
Nickel Belt News photo by Marc Jackson Craig Taylor, Bill Salahub Jr. and Chris Roney. Front left to right: Dave Koop, Sarah Bernauer and Darren Simms at the Lalor Symposium weak anomalies over the two deposits. Koop reported that from the years 1969-1974, HBED was reducing the number of claims they held and in that process gave up the area over Lalor. Falconbridge (now Extrata) staked it and subsequently did Heli-EM (Helicopter Electro Magnetic) and a ground IP (Induced Polarisation) survey over it. They likely determined the area was void of minable minerals and consequently dropped it. HBED re-staked the ground in 1977. Koop said that numerous surveys were done in area over the ensuing years; however, the drills were targeting mostly shallow anomalies, closer to surface. “Not much could be seen below the Gabro,” said Koop. “Deep detection was needed.” From 1956 to 2005 the following flavours of mineral detection were used in the area: Geochem, Mercury vapor survey, IP, Heli-EM, Boliden, HLEM, EM16, EM17, EM37, Turam, MT, MAG, Moving Loop TDEM, Titan 24, Geonics Protem 67, and Spectrem. Nevertheless, Lalor’s saga
carried on. Koop reported that during the 1980s Jerry Kitzler, Alan Bailes, and Alan Galley recognized an extreme amount of hydrothermal alteration present in the Basin. They were “supported by Neil Provins, Ted Baumgartner, Dan Ziehlke, Darren Simms, Tony Spooner, Bill Salahub, Dan McKeachnie, and Brian Janser,” Koop said. In 1984 the Crone Borehole EM System was adopted by HBED, with Bob Frazer playing a key part in this. Koop said that the Borehole EM system proved its worth by being able to see a 200-metre radius when immersed in drill holes and the technology had early success at Spruce Point Mine. “In 1987 Jerry Kitzler used the new Borehole EM system with his original Deep Chisel Fence drilling program and Chisel North was discovered,” he added. Based on that initial success (finding Chisel North), a much larger program was designed in 1990, but funds ran short. However, in 1992 a deep drill hole DUB-33 was the first indication of Lalor’s greatness.
In a 2007 interview with Marc Jackson for the book, Headframes, Happiness, and Heartaches (by James R.B. Parres and Marc Jackson), Kitzler explained what happened in respect to DUB-33 thusly: “We were so keen on this prospect that we kept proposing it, trying to get even one hole at a time if we could… and we did get a few holes that way,” Kitler said from his kitchen table in that May 2007 interview. “One of them was Dub-33. “It was a big step out to an area that we figured was close to the middle of the Chisel Basin. And we hit five centimeters of sulphide in that hole. We were pretty excited, because this was right on the horizon. This was down at the 1200 meter level and we expected that we were getting out to the bottom of the basin. We did a borehole pulse survey on that hole. And it showed that there was something there that we missed, an anomaly that was huge - because they started seeing this thing right from surface. The Geophysics people said, ‘Hey, if it’s seeing this thing right from surface,
at 1200 meters away, whatever is down there is huge!’ So we figured; that’s got to be the mother lode. It certainly had the potential But Anglo (Anglo American – HBM&S’s parent company) just would not come up with any more money to put deep holes out there.” Koop noted that, “Jerry Kitzler, Darren Simms and Bill Salahub’s sniffers were going off scale, but HBED budgets had to focus on new discoveries.” The 777, Photo Lake and Konuto deposits had just been discovered and despite a number of presentations based on DUB-33, it was not to be. Time moves on and Koop says that Anglo American decided to make one last attempt at exploration in the Flin Flon/Snow Lake Camp before making the decision to sell off Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting. “They figured the best place to explore was the Chisel Basin,” Koop reported. “They knew the favorable Chisel stratigraphy was getting progressively deeper, so they asked the geophysical group to Continued on Page 8