The territory’s preeminent gold-finder is stoked on the Yukon’s current prospects.
How do you feel about the Yukon right now?
The place is starting to ramp up. I think we’re just at the beginning of the next cycle and this should go for at least two to three years. But it’s starting. It’s kind of like the 2008 and 2009 era. Everybody was wondering what was going on, because it crashed, but it picked up quite quickly again.
Is that because of the gold price’s rise or is it really the interest from Goldcorp’s acquisition of Coffee?
If you look around North America, there’s hardly a spot where we’ve found brand new gold discoveries in a brand new camp. Even though the Klondike’s old, literally this is brand new for finding hard-rock deposits. We have two of them now, very close to each other, with two different majors buying into it. You scour North America and I don’t think there’s another spot you’ll see that has these.
Kinross is one and now Goldcorp is the second one. They’ve got some good ounces in there. Now the big boys are in and that’s what we needed in the Yukon. That’s brought a lot of confidence back to the camp. It hasn’t quite taken off yet, but it’s just on the edge.
What has Kinross been doing with White Gold?
They sidetracked. What happened was, after they bought it, they were all excited: “This is 1.5 million ounces.” But that same season, they actually bought out the big Red Back [project] in Africa and they sunk billions into that, and they pretty much shelved the Yukon because they thought the White might have between two and three million ounces if they kept drilling, but they were only up to 1.5 million.
But the one in Mauritania, the Red Back, there were potentially five million ounces and they thought they could see 16 million ounces and then they went and blew their wad there and realized there was hardly anything there. So now they’ve lost billions in write-offs. When they bought the White, they were $25 [per share] and last winter they were $3 [per share.]
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