A decade ago, following the old adage that the best place to find a new mine is in the shadow of an existing one, a team of prospectors found themselves at work near the town of Snow Lake. Truth be told, they were closer to Lalor Lake, a body of water named after Fintan Howard Lalor, a Canadian pilot officer and navigator presumed deceased after his plane went missing in eastern Canada in 1943.
In any event, the prospectors’ goal was the same as it always was: coordinate their drilling so as to pinpoint northern Manitoba’s next mine. The crew was in the employ of HudBay Minerals, formerly HBM&S and now known simply as Hudbay. Racking up sky-high profits at the time, the company was eager to build on its prolific mining legacy in the Flin Flon-Snow Lake region.
So why target Lalor Lake? The obvious answer was its close proximity to Snow Lake, which could supply workers to a mine, and even closer proximity to Hudbay’s lucrative Chisel North mine, indicative of the mineral-rich potential of the area.
But there was more to the story. Fifteen years earlier, in 1992, came the first sign of a potentially mine-worthy deposit at Lalor Lake: a deep drill hole known as DUB-33.
Jerry Kitzler, the long-time senior exploration geologist for Hudbay in Snow Lake, spoke about DUB-33 in an interview for the book Headframes, Happiness, and Heartaches by James R.B. Parres and Marc Jackson.
Kitzler noted drilling hit five centimetres of sulphide in DUB-33. Geologists performed a borehole pulse survey on the hole and found “there was something there that we missed, an anomaly that was huge.”
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