The Hardrock Project lies within the granite-greenstone Wabigoon Subprovince of the Archean Superior craton, in eastern Canada. The Wabigoon Subprovince, averaging 100 km wide, is exposed for some 900 km eastward from Manitoba and Minnesota, beneath the Mesoproterozoic cover of the Nipigon Embayment, to the Phanerozoic cover of the James Bay Lowlands (Card and Poulsen, 1998). The Wabigoon Subprovince is bounded on the south by the metasedimentary Quetico Subprovince, on the northwest by the plutonic Winnipeg River Subprovince, and on the northeast by the metasedimentary English River Subprovince. The Wabigoon-Quetico Subprovince boundary is a structurally complex, largely faulted interface.

The Hardrock Property is located within the Beardmore-Geraldton Greenstone belt that contains several narrow, east-west striking sequences of volcanic and sedimentary rocks of Archean age. The southern edges of these sequences are spatially related to the through-going, major structural discontinuities thought to be thrust faults that have imbricated the sedimentary sequences. A comprehensive description of the regional geology can be found in Smyk et al., 2005. In the Geraldton area, most of the gold mines and a number of gold showings occur within or in proximity to the Bankfield-Tombill Deformation Zone (also known as the Barton Bay Deformation Zone), a zone of folding and shearing up to 1 km wide. The southern limit of the Tombill-Bankfield Deformation Zone is marked by the ........

The Project consists of developing an open pit that will mine through the historical underground workings of the MacLeod-Cockshutt and Hard Rock Mines. Furthermore, the proposed open pit location is bisected by the Trans-Canada Highway 11 and requires a new by-pass and the relocation of various surface infrastructures.

Mining of the Hardrock main pit will occur in five main phases preceded by a starter pit.

The phase designs introduce different geotechnical slope profiles for temporary pit walls. The temporary wall slope profile allows for wider catch benches to allow for overbank hazard management on pit walls. Overbank hazard results from muck from one phase spilling down the slope of the previous pit phase, filling the catch benches. This creates an increased rockfall hazard for workers and equipment at the bottom of the previous pit phase.

The objective of pit phasing is to improve the economics of the Project by feeding the highest grade during the earlier years and/or delaying waste stripping until later years. The starter pit and Phase 1 are designed to initiate mining before the Trans Canada Highway is relocated. With the mineralization plunging westward, the pit phases progressively expand to the west.

The starter pit phase is designed to avoid various surface constraints such as the Trans-Canada Highway 11. Mining during the pre-production period is concentrated in the starter pit which provides for a 50 m buffer with t ........

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