Company President Chris Lodder says they are going through the permitting process right now.
He says “it was originally permitted for an open pit operation and just to minimize the environmental impact we decided to lessen our footprint significantly by going underground.”
Lodder says they hope to have it up and running in the final quarter of this year.
He says they have between 2 and 4 years left on the ore body they are mining right now without continued exploration.
Lodder says between 60 and 70 people are expected to be employed at the site and potentially another 20 people down at the QR mill site near Quesnel.
Right now they haul 120 kilometres to QR.
Lodder says their long term plan is to build a mining operation actually on site so they don’t have to do that.