Victoria Gold Corp. July 12 reported that its Eagle Mine in the Yukon produced 32,140 ounces of gold during the second quarter of 2021. As a result, the recently established open pit mine and heap leach recovery operation produced 58,899 during the first half of this year, a 51% increase over the same period in 2020.

Gold production at heap leach operations such as Eagle lags behind mining, crushing, and ore stacking. Additionally, gold recoveries at heap leach systems in northern climates, such as Eagle and Kinross Gold Corp.'s Fort Knox Mine in Alaska, taper off during the cold weather months of winter and into spring. This, coupled with a curtailment of ore stacking through the cold winter months during the first 90 days of each year, gold production at Eagle is expected to be strongly weighted to the second half of the year.

Victoria took advantage of the cold weather downtime to handle maintenance and upgrades to the plant.

With these upgrades complete, crews stacked 2.4 million metric tons of ore averaging 0.81 grams per metric ton gold on the heap leach pad at Eagle during the second quarter, a 12% increase in tonnage compared to the second quarter of 2020.

"Q2 was another good quarter at Eagle and with increased ore stacked, we expect to see continued growth in quarter over quarter gold production," said Victoria Gold President and CEO John McConnell. "The plant modifications we made in Q4 2020 and Q1 2021 are really starting to pay off."

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Shane Lasley, Publisher

Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.

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