Raw and untapped: Rainy River Resources opening new gold district.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: FIVE JUNIOR MINING COMPANIES TO WATCH

Northwestern Ontario and Fort Frances are emerging as Ontario's newest gold district, and Rainy River Resources is a big reason why.

For those following the Toronto junior since it began intensive drilling in 2005, it's been an endless string of press releases heralding high-grade gold intercepts on a resource that just kept getting bigger and bigger.

As the project gradually moves toward production, analysts are starting to take note and the market has responded.

The company cashed up in January with $75 million in financing for exploration engineering and environmental work that includes driving a ramp for an advanced underground program.

The Rainy River Gold Project is located about 25 kilometres north of the village of Emo and an hour's drive from Fort Frances.

Since picking up the property near the Minnesota border from Nuinsco Resources in 2005, the company hasn't looked back.

The company has a five-million-ounce resource of both indicated and inferred gold spread out over five zones of known occurrences that are near surface.

The groundwork is being laid to build a future open pit and underground mine that could be in production by 2014.

"We really want to move this project into a feasibility study as soon as possible," said president and chief executive Ray Threlkeld.

It's a project with plenty of upside with deposits that are wide open at depth and in all directions.

Their deepest intersection so far has yielded 11.45 grams per tonne gold over three metres.

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With a 100,000-metre drill program underway and six rigs in the field, the company expects to be adding fresh assay numbers by the first quarter of this year as an advanced scoping study starts to prove up the project's economics.

Last summer, the company added Threlkeld for some "bench strength," as the former Barrick Gold executive phrased it, to take the expansive 165-square-kilometre project to the next level, and deeper depths.

Threlkeld, a 30-year mining veteran, worked for Barrick in Africa and South America, bringing five mines into production.

He was...