The PDAC conference is legendary because of its giant booze-fueled parties, and there were none bigger on Sunday night than the one hosted by Integra Gold Corp., which named the winners of their clever “Gold Rush Challenge.”
The contest began this past year, after Integra acquired a task in Quebec that came with six terabytes of mining records dating back to 1933. The organization invest the data online and invited the public to find gold. More than 1,300 people entered the competition, with $1 million of prizes available to the peak submissions.
Some from the submissions were just a little dubious; one guy apparently claimed he had X-Ray glasses and could look out of our planet’s crust. But there were many strong ones as well.
Related
- Read our entire coverage of PDAC 2016
-
-
-
The five finalists within the contest faced a final round of judgment at Sunday’s party, because they made their pitches “Shark Tank”-style to a number of five well-known mining entrepreneurs sitting onstage. The audience watched and cheered them on. (OK, the crowd mostly just drank. But nonetheless.) The winning team, called SGS Geostat, walked away with $500,000.
Integra earned a lot of praise across the industry for this contest, as it was viewed as a cutting-edge way to put bright minds to operate and collect useful information. When the company makes a major gold discovery about this land, the $1 million in prizes it gave out is a bargain.
In the spirit from the competition, Integra chairman George Salamis made a speech by which he called on the industry to be more innovative. He explained he is tired of all the doom and gloom in the mining space and thinks individuals need to maneuver on.
“We must challenge and abandon old-school thinking,” he urged the crowd of approximately 400 people.
The Integra contest was inspired through the Goldcorp Challenge, a public contest launched in 2000 that helped Goldcorp Inc. identify drilling targets at its Red Lake camp. Rob McEwen, who had been Goldcorp’s chief executive at that time, would be a person in Integra’s “Shark Tank” panel on Sunday.
