At this point (1995), Placer Dome Inc. contacted Orex and asked the permission to sample
the 4,000 tonnes stockpile, which had already been sampled by Novagold. At the same
time, they asked Orex to stop their current work until they received the results from their
sampling. They mentioned that their presence would lend a lot of credibility to the project
and that they had the expertise to solve Orex’s analytical problems. They also mentioned
that they had encountered relatively similar assay problems elsewhere and could solve
them.
It is a well known fact that that high gold grades are normally found within «veins». The
«veins» being a mixture of quartz, argillite (slate) and arsenopyrite, often contained visible
gold and some galena and are always confined to the slate beds. Three other general types
of rock formations can be found in the area of interest, bull quartz (nearly 100% quartz),
slate without quartz veinlets and greywacke (with some arsenopyrite but without quartz or
pervasive alteration). The generally accepted theory implied that the bull quartz would
occasionally contain some gold, while the other two units, slate and greywacke, are almost
always barren of gold mineralization.
In order to take their decision, Placer sampled the stockpile in a very particular way. They
wanted to know the gold content of each of the four different rock types, as described
above. So they took random samples over the whole pile and separated them by rock type.
Also, each piece of rock was inspected visually and any piece with visible gold was
eliminated from the sample. Those four samples were then sent to Placer laboratory in
Vancouver, where they prepared a two kilograms representative portion separated from