The Porcupine-Destor gold belt could sprout another mine in the West TImmins gold camp.
Buoyed by recent high-grade drill results, Toronto's Galleon Gold closed the purse after raising $8 million in flow-through shares for exploration at its West Cache Gold Project, 13 kilometres west of Timmins.
Mining financier Eric Sprott, the company's controlling shareholder at 23 per cent, acquired $1.8 million of the share offering.
The company is in the midst of a 15,000-metre drill program at West Cache that kicked off in late June.
Highway 101 runs through the property, seven kilometres northeast of Pan American Silver's Timmins West Mines and 14 kilometres southwest of Newmont's Hollinger Mine.
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At the end of September, Galleon proclaimed the discovery of a large, high-grade gold zone within 300 metres of surface that company president R. David Russell remarked will definitely drive the project's economics.
The company believes there's great potential for West Cache to host both an open pit and underground mine.
One part of the exploration program is dedicated to infill drilling. The other half is probing deeper zones of high-grade gold and following up on some newly identified exploration targets.
The company said it hopes to do a preliminary economic assessement at some point.
West Cache has been well-explored turf since 1927 with more than 325 drill holes punched and more than 160,000 metres of core.
The last mineral estimate published by Explor Resources in 2013 placed the open-pit resources at 213,000 ounces(4,283,000 tonnes at 1.55 grams per tonne) (in the indicated category, and 77,000 ounces (1,140,000 tonnes at 2.09 grams per tonne in the inferred column) using a 0.30 grams per tonne cut-off grade.
The underground mineral resources placed the indicated resource at 396,000 ounces (4,420,000 tonnes at 2.79 grams per tonne) and 393,000 ounces (5,185,000 tonnes at 2.36 grams per tonne) using a 1.70 g/t cut-off grade.
