Canadian miner Hudbay Minerals is stepping up efforts for a new discovery in the Snow Lake region of Manitoba, having sealed several transactions with multiple landholders in recent weeks that will massively bolster its landholding in the region.

The company has acquired the Cook Lake properties, a mere 10 km from, and along the same regional trend, as its Lalor mine. These properties are untested by modern deep geophysics and provide potential for a new discovery.

The Cook properties are within 30 km of Hudbay’s Stall and New Britannia processing facilities.

Historical drilling intersected base metal and gold mineralisation and the drill programmes were limited to only 275 m, which is a fraction of the Lalor deposit’s current known depth of 600 m to 1 500 m.

Hudbay also last month entered into an agreement to acquire Rockcliff Metals, which is one of the biggest landholders in the Snow Lake area with more than 1 800 km² across all its properties. The completion of the arrangement will consolidate Hudbay’s ownership of the Talbot deposit and provide the company with additional exploration properties in the vicinity of its Stall and New Britannia mills.

These additional properties include the land adjacent to Hudbay’s Pen II deposit, which is a low tonnage and high-grade zinc deposit that starts from surface and is located approximately 12 km by road from the Lalor mine.

Incorporating the recently announced agreement to acquire Rockcliff Metals, Hudbay’s land position within trucking distance of its Snow Lake processing facilities will expand by more than 250%.

In addition, Hudbay has announced positive results from step-out drilling about 500 m northwest of Lalor, intersecting a series of base metal and copper/gold zones, including a high-grade copper/gold/silver zone.

The company’s 2023 winter drill programme in Snow Lake also included four drill rigs testing the down-plunge copper/gold extensions of the Lalor deposit, in the first drilling in the deeper zones at Lalor since the initial discovery of the copper/gold zones in 2009 and 2010.

Down-plunge drilling has indicated that the alteration zone, hosting mineralisation currently being mined, continues for at least another 2 km.

“Since the start-up of Lalor in 2014, much of our focus has been on in-mine resource conversion, where we have had tremendous success adding over two-million ounces of additional high-grade gold reserves. In our first step-out and down-plunge drill programme since the initial discovery of the gold and copper-gold lenses at Lalor more than a decade ago, the results demonstrate the potential to replicate our exploration success through the discovery of additional high-grade zones that could enhance near-term production and further extend mine life,” comments president and CEO Peter Kukielski.

Hudbay believes that the positive exploration results and land consolidation initiatives provide the potential to deliver increases in near-term production, mine life extension and substantial long-term value creation from the Snow Lake operations.

Hudbay intends to explore these claims in hopes of finding a new anchor deposit to maximise and extend the life of Hudbay’s Snow Lake operations beyond 2038.