The Project lies within a broad region of relatively young (15Ma) volcanic rocks predominantly made up of welded flow banded rhyolite units interlayered with unwelded bedded tuffs (Bussey, 1996). The volcanic host rocks and subsequent hydrothermal activity associated with this volcanism is interpreted to be the cause of the gold mineralisation and associated large scale alteration observed at Bells.

Bells has the typical geological signature of a low-sulphidation epithermal deposit which formed close to the surface. Throughout north-west Nevada, there exists other similar epithermal gold deposits (such as Midas and Sleeper) which have a documented age similar to Bells and are interpreted to be related to volcanism and hydrothermal activity from the Yellowstone “Hot Spot” (Saunders et. al., 2008).

Bells is defined by a large area of alteration which has affected the volcanic host rocks and it is this alteration which initially attracted explorers to the project area. The gold mineralisation within this large alteration feature is predominantly dispersed horizontally along favourable and relatively flat lying host rocks. The current Mineral Resource estimate is based on the style of mineralisation that was the initial focus of exploration and mining. This style of mineralisation is dominated by relatively flat lying and dispersed low-grade gold mineralisation.

The Bells Deposit is shallow, flat lying and amenable to conventional open pit mining methods. The resource model was converted to a regularised 5m x 5m x 5m block mining model which was considered a suitable selective mining unit size for this style of deposit. This resulted in an overall dilution of the Mineral Resource model of approximately 5.8%. In the mining model, the regularised blocks were considered either ore or waste.

The Bells deposit is planned to be mined using conventional open pit mining methods in seven stages. The mining operation will be on dayshift only with a roster of two production crews on a 4-days on and 4-days off, 12 hours per day.

Open pit mining will be by diesel-powered equipment, utilising a combination of one 40 tonne rotary blasthole rig drilling 200mm diameter blastholes, one 12m3 hydraulic backhoe excavator, and four, 91- tonne capacity trucks to handle ore and waste. The mining fleet has enough capacity to move up to approximately 6Mtpa on dayshift. Support equipment composed of a grader, track dozers and water truck will aid in the mining. Ore will be hauled downhill to the crushing area for stockpiling before being rehandled for primary crushing. Initially, waste rock will be stored in the waste rock dumps close to the pit to reduce haulage costs. After year one, most of the waste will be backfilled into the pit to reduce haulage costs and surface disturbance.

The final pit was designed using 10m benches, ........

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