Prospects Keep Drive Alive

The airstrip at Western Copper’s Casino property in the Dawson Range mountains says a lot about the company’s aggressive and no-turning-back way of doing business because the runway, like the site itself, is built on the ‘side’ of a mountain.

That’s right, the ‘side,’ not the top or in the valley below, but on the side of the mountain where the pilot actually accelerates upon landing with the plane’s nose facing the sky until its rear wheels touch the face of the mountain-side runway. With the rear wheels down, gravity and speed bring the nose wheel safely down as the plane comes to a stop.

As harrowing as it may sound, pilots say the landing at Casino is exciting, yet rather straightforward. Taking off is just the reverse. Planes accelerate ‘down’ the mountainside and get a quick lift from upward winds from the valley below.

It’s aggressive but safe and well calculated now, just like the exploration and drilling program is for Western Copper at its Casino site, located about 300 km northwest of Whitehorse. Unlike the property’s name (Casino), gambling is not something that Western Copper is banking on with this project because they know it’s a sure bet.

The Casino deposit is unique among Canadian porphyry deposits as it escaped the most recent glaciation. It has a substantially preserved oxide gold Leach cap, a well-developed Supergene copper-enriched zone and a Hyrogene copper-gold zone. The deposit is weathered to an average depth of 70 m producing a well defined Leached cap (Oxide Gold zone) that is for the most part gold enriched and copper depleted due to the Supergene alteration processes.

With depth, the Supergene alteration erratically grades from poorly defined Supergene Oxide zone (upper copper oxide zone) to a better-defined Supergene Sulphide zone (lower copper sulphide zone).

The average thickness of the copper oxide zone and the copper sulphide zone are 10 m and 60 m respectively.

TheCasinodepositof8.0Moz Gold, 4.4 B lb Copper, 475 M lb Moly (Proven + Probable Reserve) represents the largest undeveloped copper-gold reserve in North America and will be developed as a huge open pit mine with a projected mine life of 30 years. The pit will be 1.6 km wide, 2.2 km long and up to 600 m deep. More than 10,000 m of drilling has been done around the pit area and another 15,000 m is planned for 2010.

In fact, last summer’s assay results indicate a significant expansion of the known area of mineralization. Only one hole in the 39-hole exploration program, CAS-035, to the west of the deposit and outside the currently defined pit, did not return intercepts of mineralization above the resource cutoff grade of (0.3% CuEq).

In addition to pit development, further construction at Casino will unfold over a period of four years. After the first two years of construction, gold will be recovered from the oxide cap by heap leaching and sulphide ore processing, by conventional flotation, would start approximately two years later.

Gold-silver dore produced from the gold heap leach will be shipped to metal refiners while the copper-gold and molybdenum concentrates produced from the flotation mill will be shipped to Port of Haines or Skagway, Alaska, for shipping to smelters.

Total capital cost of the Casino Project will be C$2.1 B which includes an all-season road as well as a C$548 M power plant to provide 100 kW of electrical power.