The deposit type at Courageous Lake has been described as an epithermal-like gold deposit. All lithologies are metamorphosed, consisting predominantly of volcanic and sedimentary rocks. Gold zones occur in a series of long narrow bands and associated with the introduction of silica, muscovite and sulphides. The sulphides present include pyrite, pyrrhotite, arsenopyrite, sphalerite, and chalcopyrite. Pyrite is present throughout the volcanic pile and ranges from trace to 5% while pyrrhotite is more restricted in its occurrence in sedimentary rocks, and volcanic rock fractures, ranging from trace to 8%. Arsenopyrite is strongly associated with the presence of gold, especially as acicular needles and provides an excellent field guide for gold occurrence.

Carbonates are also present throughout the deposit as calcite, ankerite and siderite, either as secondary minerals with quartz, or infilling of fractures and shear zones. Potential for ML/ARD needs to be considered for the deposit given the widespread distribution of sulphides.

A production schedule has been developed at a pre-feasibility level for the Courageous Lake Project based on a 17,500 t/d mill feed rate. The pit phases are engineered based on the results of the chosen pit limit.

The majority of the waste rock mining will be carried out with large shovels and trucks. The planned bench height for efficient waste mining with the large mining equipment has been set at 15 m.

Ore mining is planned using smaller backhoes with a triple split-bench mining method (to reduce mining dilution volume). The backhoes will selectively mine on 5 m benches, removing the hanging wall and footwall waste away from the ore zone as defined by the OCS. They will then load ore into the large trucks. This helps to avoid having two different truck fleets at the operations.

Using this selective mining technique, the backhoes will be able to separate a 5 m x 5 m x 5 m block into smaller parts along the ore/waste boundary within them. The blocks in the 3DBM in this study have whole block grades calculated for each block, which includes internal dilution. The block edges do not represent the ore/waste digging boundary that will actually be achieved during operations. At this time, using a long range resource model with wider-spaced drilling, it is not feasible to accurately model the detailed geologic shapes necessary for the selective mining method described above, and a smaller block size in the current modelling procedure is only bene ........

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