https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/
Toronto mining journalist hits PDAC 2023 with a primer on arrested development in the Far North
“Keep the faith.” It was an oft-used phrase by Richard “Dick” Nemis, a Sudbury native and colourful mining promoter whose company, Noront Resources, secured one of the largest land positions in the mineral-rich area of the James Bay known as the Ring of Fire.
Nemis clung to that motto even as he was being ousted by shareholders as the president of the junior mining company he helped establish in October 2008. It was personal blow since the exploration outfit was named after his father’s industrial fabrication company, started in the Nickel City in 1945, and still in operation today.
The Canadian mining hall-of-famer raised financing for many mineral plays but his hand in one of the biggest chromite discoveries in the world, in the Ring of Fire, remains his legacy. He had always been intrigued by the lure of a treasure hunt.
And so is Virginia Heffernan, a veteran mining writer and now the author of a forthcoming book entitled: Ring of Fire; High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness. Sadly, Nemis died in March 2019, months before Heffernan started her book project.