Thayer Lindsley Award For An International Mineral Discovery

This award, honouring the memory of one of Canada’s greatest mine finders, recognizes an individual or a team of explorationists credited with a recent significant mineral discovery or series of discoveries anywhere in the world.

Longtime prospectors Perry Durning and Bud Hillemeyer are being recognized for their substantial record of grassroots discoveries in Mexico. These include, in 1994, the San Sebastian mine with a life-of-mine production over four years of 11.2 million oz. of silver and 155,937 oz of gold; the San Agustin gold deposit in 1996 (1.6 million oz. indicated, 1.1 million oz. inferred); La Pitarrilla silver deposit in 2002 (91.7 million oz. probable, plus 551.6 million oz. measured and indicated, and one of the most significant silver discoveries in the last decade); and most recently in 2007 the Camino Rojo gold discovery (3.4 million oz. gold and 60.7 million oz. silver).

According to Larry Buchanan, himself a previous award winner, … “(Perry and Bud) made these discoveries the ‘old fashioned way,’ by eschewing the comforts of hotels and restaurants, by hiking ungodly amounts of kilometers through rough country, by camping each night wherever sunset found them, and by using geological insights they themselves developed.”