“The old-timers thought 5,000 grams per tonne was too low to mine,” says Frank Basa, CEO and Chairman of Nord Precious Metals Mining Inc. (TSXV: NTH | OTCQB: CCWOF). “Think about that.” His disbelief carries pride—an echo from the past reborn in the present. Today, Nord is again pulling extraordinary grades from Ontario’s storied Cobalt Camp, a district once hailed as the world’s richest silver producer. “We came out with these crazy grades—89,000 grams a tonne, 50,000, 20,000,” Basa recounts. “It might be we’re going back to another cycle of super-high grades.”
What began as a $25,000 purchase put on his credit card has evolved into a multi-million-dollar revival. “The cheapest property now in the camp is $5 million,” Basa says. “Another company came in and spent $10 million.” Yet, for him, the prize remains elusive: “When I was with Agnico, we were looking for the motherlode. We’ve never found it. I think it’s still here.”
Nord’s transformation has mirrored the rally in silver itself. A recent capital raise aimed for $1 million but ballooned to $11 million within weeks. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Basa says. “The price of silver was going up—everything was lined up for us.”
The company’s near-term focus lies in reprocessing the Beaver Mine tailings, where test work produced commercial-grade silver concentrate. “We have these very high-grade Beaver tails,” Basa says. “The grade is between 4 to 10 ounces a ton. Some people have a resource at that grade.” He cites Ontario’s new “recovery permit,” which allows for approvals in just 10 weeks. “You can’t get that anywhere in the world,” he adds.
Basa estimates that tailings reprocessing could yield half a million ounces of silver annually—a stepping-stone toward Nord’s three-year production plan. “We actually have two plants,” he says. “One is for the tailings, and the other is for hard rock. We’d like to start producing next year on the tailings, then move to the hard rock within that same three-year time frame.” For a camp once left for dead, the revival feels poetic. “This was the highest-grade area in the world,” Basa reflects. “We might just be going back to that again.”
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