Wawa gold explorer Red Pine Exploration has completed an $11-million financing deal that the Toronto junior miner intends to invest in the drill bit this fall.
This is much-needed cash for the struggling company which survived an assay tampering scandal from earlier this year that plunged its share price and brought exploration activity to a halt.
The financing comes in the form of flow-through and common shares, which will be used for exploration and corporate expenses.
Red Pine started out in September looking to raise $7 million and steadily upsized its offer to $9.5 million and now to $11 million.
All through the summer Red Pine had financially been on perilous ground.
Plunged into deep water was new CEO Michael Michaud, the former head geologist with nearby Wesdome, who’s been hard on the investor relations campaign trail, looking to restore confidence in the project.
Michaud, who is familiar with the area, is applying some new ideas about the property’s geology.
The Wawa Gold Project is Red Pine’s one and only asset. The 7,000-hectare property it holds is two kilometres south of the community of Wawa and is comprised of a series of historic gold mines and deposits that the company tied together and has put under the microscope to get the big geological picture.
The company recently published a new gold resource, upping the estimate from 700,000 ounces to 1.7 million of indicated and inferred ounces based off of 65,000 metres of drilling over the last five years. The new estimate takes into account low-grade gold near the surface,
The company is examining its options when it comes to mining, which could involve beginning with a starter pit, before transitioning to higher grade gold deeper down.
In releasing a new mineral estimate in late August, the company said it wants to take drilling much deeper to better define the size of the deposit, and expand its parameters, by stepping out further from a very promising structural feature called the Jubilee Shear.
Red Pine’s Wawa Gold Project sits in the Michipicoten Green Belt, an active gold mining and exploration area. Barrick Gold, operators of the Hemlo mine near Marathon, has staked claims close to Red Pine. Wesdome has been running its Eagle River Mine since the mid-1990s and Alamos has expanded its mining footprint in the Dubreuilville area with its recent acquisition of neighbouring Argonaut Gold and its fledgling Magino Mine. Alamos is also a big 13.5 per cent shareholder in Red Pine.
Where once Red Pine shares had plunged to $0.08 per share in May, the new CEO, the updated mineral resource estimate, and an ambitious exploration plan tabled in August have boosted the per share price to $0.13.
