North of 60 Mining News - The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North

Seabridge Gold Inc. Sept. 22 announced that it has been bestowed the 2022 Jake McDonald Annual Mine Reclamation Award for its C$12 million environmental cleanup and reclamation program at the Johnny Mountain Mine on its Iskut property in Northern British Columbia.

"It's a great honour to be recognized with the prestigious Jake McDonald Annual Mine Reclamation Award, which further validates our reputation as a 'responsible operator' and our commitment to protect the environment," said Seabridge Gold Chairman and CEO Rudi Fronk.

For more than 45 years, the British Columbia Technical and Research Committee on Reclamation has been awarding companies that carry out outstanding achievements in mine reclamation in British Columbia with the Jake McDonald Mine Reclamation Award.

Seabridge has received this honor for voluntarily undertaking an initiative to work with the Tahltan Nation to bring the 1980s-era Johnny Mountain gold-silver copper mine in the Tahltan Territory back to pre-mine conditions.

Immediately following its 2016 acquisition of the Iskut property, which lies alongside the border with Southeast Alaska, Seabridge launched a cleanup program of the former Johnny Mountain Mine, which was in a complete state of disrepair.

Though the reclamation liabilities on the Iskut property happened three decades earlier, including several outstanding BC Ministry of the Environment environmental orders, Seabridge felt strongly that this historical disrepair should not be ignored, and remediation efforts were launched immediately.

"Seabridge Gold has shown great leadership in its ongoing efforts to reclaim an inherited site with a high level of Indigenous nation support and involvement," said Tim Antill, outgoing chair of the BC Technical and Research Committee on Reclamation and chair of the awards subcommittee.

This includes working closely with the Tahltan Central Government, the administrative governing body of the Tahltan First Nations.

"We have a strong interest in the remediation of the Johnny Mountain mine site on our traditional territory," Tahltan Central Government President Chad Day said in 2016. "We expect to work closely with Seabridge to ensure that Tahltan citizens benefit from this work and that we are kept fully informed of the progress that is being made in the planned clean-up programs."

Seabridge Gold Inc.

Reclaiming a tailings pond left behind by legacy mining at Johnny Mountain.

Over the ensuing six years, the Seabridge team has been working with the Tahltan Nation to address the much-needed remediation at the Johnny Mountain Mine site.

"We want to thank the Tahltan Central Government, the Tahltan Nation Development Corporation, our consultants and contractors for supporting us in mitigating the impacts of the historical mining activity within Tahltan Territory," said Fronk. "We undertook this work before the current emphasis on ESG simply because it was the right thing to do and an expression of our corporate values. The Iskut property is stunningly beautiful and it was a privilege to remove the blight of irresponsible historical mining practices."

Seabridge will complete the full reclamation and closure of the Johnny Mountain site in 2025.

Author Bio

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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