Hawthorne Commences Mining of Bulk Sample from Taurus
Thursday, August 20th 2009
Hawthorne Gold Corp. announce the Company has commenced the extraction of a 10,000-tonne bulk sample from the Sable Zone located within the Taurus claim area.
On August 14, 2009, the Company received the Notice of Work approval # 09-0100011-0814 from the Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources to extract the bulk sample. The bulk sample will be stockpiled next to the Cassiar Gold Mine mill facility and processed with the mill start-up. Stripping of overburden will commence immediately and hauling of the bulk sample will commence soon after. The work program is being completed by local contractors, including the Dease River Development Corporation and related First Nation companies, with planned completion in September 2009.
“With the completion of the first two phases of diamond drilling in the Taurus Zone, the commencement of the bulk sampling is another milestone for Hawthorne as we advance towards production at the Cassiar Gold Mine,” commented Richard Barclay, President and CEO of Hawthorne.
The goal of the (two-phase) diamond drill program (within the Taurus Claims) was to delineate near-surface gold mineralization greater than 3.5 g/t Au, amenable to open pit mining. Concurrent with this program, samples from this zone are undergoing metallurgical testing to determine if feed from Taurus can be processed at the Cassiar Gold Mine mill in order to supplement Table Mountain feed and maximize the throughput at the 270 metric tonnes per day mill facility. The Taurus Deposit currently contains a National Instrument (“NI”) 43-101 Mineral Inferred Resource Estimate(i) of 1.06 million ounces of gold (33.06 million tonnes grading 1.00 g/t Au).
