The Sugar Zone mine is high grade underground mine in Northern Ontario, approximately 30km north of White River or midway between Thunder Bay and Sault St. Marie.
The Sugar Zone deposit is hosted within the Dayohessarah Greenstone Belt located in the Abitibi-Wawa Subprovince of the SuperiorProvince between the Hemlo Belt to the west and the Kabinakagami Belt to the east. The deposit is defined by sets of parallel, mineralized quartz veins, quartz flooding of strongly altered wall rock, thin intermediary porphyry lenses and dykes / sills parallel to stratigraphy and foliation, and gold mineralization. Gold mineralization mainly occurs in quartz veins, stringers, and quartz-flooded zones predominantly associated with porphyry zones, porphyry contact zones, hydrothermally altered basalts and, rarely, weakly altered or unaltered basalt within the three subzones.
Mining of the Sugar Zone ore is by long hole open stoping method with ore hauled to surface for processing at the on site mill. The Sugar Zone comminution circuit includes two stage crushing and ball mill, followed by a gravity circuit to produce gold dore bars and flotation to produce gold concentrate. The plant has a processing capacity of approximately 800ttph or 292,000tpa.
Following completion of the acquisition in February 2022, Silver Lake commenced a review of operations at the Sugar Zone mine with the objective of delivering material operational improvements and a low capital intensity growth strategy to leverage the installed infrastructure and current Mineral Resource.
