There is talk of open pit, but it's only in the Ascot Zone (the big red blob on the geochem). The reason for this is that the deposit is close to surface.

I'm going to throw this out there for the argument against the open pit mine;

Picture a cake, with a dozen layers of icing in it. All you really crave is the icing, as the cake is just going to carb you up and go straight to your hips.

To get the icing out you could either work through the cake from top to bottom and discard the cakey parts you don't want. OR, you could cut the cake in half, turn it on it's side and simply just scoop out the icing and leave the cake alone.

There are so many layers of icing, and they are so easy to access if you cut the cake in half it's might be more efficient to just go straight for the icing instead of decimating the entire cake.

So picture dropping a 2km long trench across the middle of these claims, perpendicular to the quartz veins, and down to 1000m. From there you can scoop out the very wide quartz mineralization in each direction and bring the good stuff right back to your processing mill. You avoid decimating the landscape and paying out compensation for trees, homes, etc to the landowners.

I'm not clear on this, but the few times I've had it explained to me that is how I understood it to make sense.

Of course, they could also look at an open pittable area like Ascot and use that to fund the larger underground development.

In any event, if the grades are close to what Tilsley believes they are (but is unable to prove using a drill) which is 6g/t or better - I think this deposit will be quite profitable to mine.