There’s a minor gold rush going on in Nova Scotia as prospectors and mining companies try to find new sources of the precious commodity.
Nova Scotia has always been a pretty good place to look for gold and now, with the price of the precious metal edging toward $1,500 an ounce, it may be even more attractive than before.
For example, on Friday, Beatrix Ventures Inc. of Vancouver announced it has acquired an option to earn a 100 per cent right, title and interest in a property in Seal Harbour, Guysborough County, which is about four kilometres southeast of Goldboro.
In recent times, Goldboro wasbest known as the place where offshore natural gas pipelines made landfall, but it got its name because of gold mining. Now, two Quebec gold mining companies — Osisko Mining Corp. and Orex Exploration Inc. — have identified significant "indicated and inferred categories" of gold in Goldboro, which is considered by Beatrix Ventures to be part of the Seal Harbour gold district.
Geologist Mike Taylor, a Beatrix director, has been acting as the company’s vice-president of exploration. Based in Miramichi, N.B., Taylor is also president and CEO of Slam Exploration Ltd.
Slam has been searching for gold prospects all across Canada and has properties in Ontario and New Brunswick. Slam and Beatrix Ventures have been jointly developing a gold property called Opikeigen, which is near Reserve Creek, Ont.
Taylor says he has been helping Beatrix find additional properties of its own and the Seal Harbour property was the result of that search. The claims on the property are owned by a group of Nova Scotia prospectors, headed by Scott Grant, who signed the agreement with Beatrix.
"It is early days on the (Seal Harbour) project," says Taylor. "We are definitely excited by what Osisko and Orex are doing to the north of us there. We’ve got to do a comprehensive evaluation of the property over the next few months, get some boots on the ground and see what kind of numbers we can pull off the field workings."
The current price for gold is certainly a catalyst, he says, but the company needs to find enough gold to make its recovery sustainable even at lower prices.
"You know there is so much gold in Nova Scotia that . . . we’re of the opinion that somewhere there it’s really going to come together to a big deposit."
Gold was mined at the Seal Harbour property from 1894 to 1949 and there is a huge geological structure going through the property, Taylor told me a phone conversation Friday.
"It has the signature for gold and it hasn’t had a lot of deep exploration there, so we think we can take what was there before and expand it."
Taylor, who is getting ready for the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada annual convention at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre next week, says gold will be a major topic of discussion at this year’s annual event.
"A lot of these historical (gold) areas are going to see a lot of investment, I’d say, over the next couple of years," he says.
Eugene Beukman, president of Beatrix Ventures, told me over the phone from Vancouver that his junior mining company had been trading on the Canadian National Stock Exchange and only recently moved to the larger TSX Venture Exchange, which should allow the company to become better known.
Beatrix has about $600,000 in the bank, which is earmarked for exploration, he says.
( rtaylor@herald.ca)
