What's in a name?

I have to admit I get a kick out of the names that mining companies use to describe their prospects and potential mining properties.

Back in the day, mines were named usually after the person who discovered them or the name of the company. I think of Timmins which had the world famous Hollinger and the McIntyre gold mines, named in tribute to the prospectors.

I was thinking about this last night when I met Al Coutts, (guy in the photo) the president and CEO of Noront Resources. That’s the company that owns about 90 percent of the mineral properties in the area known as the Ring of Fire in Northern Ontario.

There you go. This is a world class ore zone in the middle of the Canadian muskeg, and it’s called Ring of Fire. Not named after the Johnny Cash song through. It is names for its circular shape of ore zones over a wide area of land.  It is already famous because it has so much chromite, a key ingredient in stainless steel. But there are also huge quantities of nickel, copper, zinc, palladium, diamonds, silver and gold. This is an ore zone that will last well into the next century.

Some of the ore zones have names like Black Thor, Black Horse, Eagle’s Nest, the Blackbird and Big Daddy.  Every diamond miner in Northern Ontario knows that the De Beers Victor mine is also known as Brad’s Pit – a tribute to geologist Brad Wood who discovered the diamond zone back in the 70s. Over in Hemlo, there was the Golden Giant mine, discovered by Timmins prospectors. 

East of Timmins, McEwen has the Black Fox mine. Right in Timmins is the super-rich Hoyle Pond mine, which was discovered by mistake back in the 1970s, when a tailings pond on the Texas Gulf property failed.  Crews went in to clean it up and gold was discovered.

Even Detour Gold north of Timmins gets people wondering about the name. Temagami had the Beanland and Big Dan mines. Go figure.