Hi Tellit!

The location of the property is actually pretty good from the perspective of development. There is road access right through the property area, in some cases just steps from the mineralized veins.  So the development costs will be reasonable.

I do not think that an open pit mine is going to be the story.  My guess is that the higher grade zones will be encountered to depth, and that the majority of the resource will be outlined deeper than can be accessed by open pit mining.  Also the width of the veins is just too narrow to bother trying to design a pit, since even moderate depths would generate so much waste rock to be extracted it would kill the economics.

A bulk tonnage program is probably in the cards though.  They will extract perhaps 10,000 tonnes from the wider surface vein areas and run that through a mill to see just what kind of gold recovery they can achieve.  Since the trench and drill core samples are so variable from one sample to the next, a bulk tonnage scenario will be far more accurate to gauge the grades and recovery under realistic operating circumstances.

Recruiting any experienced management personnel right now is difficult.  Since the industry was in a contraction and bear market for so many years, there were not many job opportunities for an entire generation.  Now that mining is booming again, most of the qualified people are now in high demand and they are approaching retirement age.  Mitigating this is the excitement factor of such a high grade deposit, so it will be more attractive for potential candidates to be encouraged to work there.

I know that competition is intense even for young geos.  I would suspect that they will have to jump through some hoops to round up a good operating team.

cheers!

mike