Silver Price Surge Revives Old Mine Waste Rock Explorations

The surge in silver prices has put the Temiskaming area back in vogue for exploratory mining. Kuya Silver and Brixton Metals are among those investigating old mine waste rock from turn-of-the-last-century mining in the Cobalt camp.

Kuya's Silver Kings project is a prime example, with early results showing 'significant' silver mineralization on its 13,000-hectare property. The company is sorting through blasted course rock and finer mill-crushed tailings to determine if there's enough high-grade minerals worth recovering.

The Kerr project within the Silver Kings property hosts eight former mines that produced between 50 million and 60 million ounces of silver between 1905 and 1970, and 900,000 pounds of cobalt. Sampling results have shown up to 168 grams per tonne silver and 0.365% cobalt in crushed material at the site of the former Kerr Lake mill.

While this material would be considered too low grade for early miners, it looks promising for Kuya. The company plans to do more sampling around the property and metallurgical testing before coming out with a resource estimate.