Great. If we can get everyone to take our seats, we can commence here on time. I hear that, yeah. I'd like to welcome everybody here today to Kiena Complex Updated Mineral Resource presentation. I'm joined here today by Michael Michaud, our Vice President of Exploration up here at the podium, also with Karine Brousseau, our Senior Engineer, Mineral Resources, situated at the Kiena Mine in Quebec, and Bruno Turcotte, our Senior Project Geologist at Kiena. I'm also joined here by Marc-André Pelletier, our Chief Operating Officer, Lindsay Dunlop, our Vice President of Investor Relations, and Heather Laxton, our Chief Governance Officer. Without further ado, we'll get into this.
The mode of this presentation is really I've got a few overview slides, and then we're going to have Michael come up and give a more detailed explanation of the changes in the resource estimate and the really high-quality job I believe that everybody associated with it has done. We'll get on with it. Of course, there'll be some forward-looking statements, so I'll mention that. Off to our strategy. Really, we talk about building Canada's next mid-tier gold producer, and really the concept has always been in order to get to the mid-tier status, we'd like to get a minimum floor of about 200,000 ounces. In order to do that in the shorter term, we always saw the potential for the Wawa operations to get up to 100,000 ounces in that range.
We also saw really good potential for the Kiena Mine for a restart and to get that up to a minimum of 100,000 ounces. In that way, we sort of redefine ourselves as not being a junior gold miner in Canada. Beyond that, we're able to show some growth. Essentially, the cornerstone of our existence really here at Wesdome is we're in great jurisdictions, Ontario and Québec. Québec is by far the best jurisdiction I've ever been involved with in terms of mining projects. These assets are already built, so really the level of capital expenditures for infrastructure has really been reduced. What essentially we're doing here is optimizing what we already had in the Wawa region. Kiena really had great infrastructure, and the fact was we just need some resources in order to convert those to reserves. Really that's the plan in the short term.
We sort of see this as moving ahead from one to three years. We see that mid-tier status being attainable. Corporately, the company's been around for 30 years now. We've got about 137 million shares outstanding, CAD 27.8 million in the kitty as of the 30th of June. We have no debt. We're well covered analytically in Toronto. We've got a very supportive shareholder base. We're 55% institutional, 45% retail. Really, I think everybody is very focused on the fact that we're able to execute on our strategy, and I'd have to say, so far so good. Just a quick overview of our projects. Our number one asset, of course, is the producing asset just outside of Wawa, Ontario. That's Eagle River complex. Eagle River Mine's been in existence for over 25 years now.
It's a narrow vein, high-grade mine, currently operating at around 500 tons per day. This is really the cash generator for everything we do here at Wesdome, and it's been going rather well there in terms of reserve replacement and new exciting exploration developments there. I think things are well in hand for the Wawa operations to basically take that sort of, I'd say one of the two pillars for this company moving into the mid-tier status. At the Wawa complex, we have an 850 ton per day mill, and currently in this time of good production and high gold prices, we're certainly investing into infrastructure both at the mill, the tailings, and the mine. We are building this for the future, and we do see a good future here in Wawa. Over to asset number 2, we've got the Kiena Mine.
Kiena Mine is a great mine, great past producer really built by Falconbridge Gold, bought out by Placer Dome back in the early 1980s. Kiena Mine produced about 1.75 million ounces, so a really credible producer. I think the noteworthy thing about Kiena is it's fully built, fully permitted, 2,000 tonnes per day mill. This does not require a lot of infrastructure money in order to get this operational. Kiena, as you know, was put on care and maintenance back in 2013, ran out of mineable reserves. Since that point, really 2016 and onward, the company spent a lot of time, money, and effort in order to follow up on some high-grade hits that were historically drilled throughout the mine life and just never really understood.
It was only upon us developing the ramp and getting a much better understanding of really what we had and found out it was a different structure that we were on that this all came together. There we are with Kiena and obviously the resource today. The third company asset that we have, of course, is the Moss Lake, and Moss Lake is actually the largest inventory of resource ounces we have. It's almost 4 million ounces, low grade, 1.1 grams per ton. I would say sort of a large open pitable type deposit, and that's really the concept for that one right now. Quite frankly, Moss Lake is not on the front burners. It's on the back burners. We're very focused on getting Eagle up to 100,000 ounces and getting some sort of a restart plan for Kiena. That's where we are today. Eagle River overview quickly.
We've got about 404,000 ounces in reserves at 12 grams. We've really been doing very well in terms of our production this year based on some high grades that we've encountered. I think that we've got an emerging resource here now. We've got about 190,000 ounces of indicated and inferred, something which previously wasn't there. Exploration results at Eagle River have been excellent. We've got some new, I'd say, emerging mineralization outside the mine diorite out into the mafic volcanics. That's very exciting for us because this just really unconfines us from the diorite. I look forward to continued exploration success there, and I'm sure we'll have some. Just quickly about our guidance. We've guided the market at the start of the year, 72,000-80,000 ounces. The first half of the year, we're somewhat over 41,000 ounces.
I've been saying lately that really we're going to be towards the top end of guidance or just beyond, really driven by grade. We're really right on plan in terms of our production and where the volume is supposed to come from. I think the exciting thing about us is that currently the grades for the first half of the year have almost been 21 grams, where we thought they would be 16. We've had some very positive reconciliations, especially from the 303 area, but all the other mining zones have really been performing well. I think that certainly helped to fund everything that we do here. When we go to Kiena, as I mentioned before, fully built, great infrastructure, never been flooded, great mining jurisdiction. Val-d'Or, Quebec, it's pretty hard to beat that one. It's an exciting prospect that we have now.
We see emerging high-grade resources developing, which we're going to talk about today and the estimation of that. I think we just get one step closer as we go on here, just by getting closer to that restart plan potential that we have. There's the property. I think the takeaway from this is we're surrounded by great producers, great past producers. The property is encompassed by all sorts of mineralization just north of the Cadillac Break. I think there's a lot of potential on this property right now, the 65 sq km we have. The one thing I will point out, I think we're probably exploring about 1% of that. Again, totally focused on a restart plan here. This is exploration done within the shadow of the headframe, so this is where our focus is.
As we get going and hopefully, again, get into this restart plan, I think we can concentrically go away from the shaft and really start some good, I'd say, property-wide exploration. Without that, I'm going to pass this over to Mike Michaud, our Vice President of Exploration, for a detailed review of our resource estimation. Mike?
Good afternoon. Really, what a difference a year has made, and actually less than a year, about eight months or so. Let's face it, our resource that we put out on this project in December of last year was really for us, somewhat underwhelming for what we thought the property could hold. Really what we wanted to do at that point was say, "Let's go in and start to do a better job." I think an important part of that is the team that we've built there at Kiena. Bruno's done a great job here exploring and extending this deposit. Karine has been with us now for eight or nine months, and she's really been doing the heavy lifting on this resource estimate. They're both going to be available for detailed questions after this.
I just want to recognize them because without having the great team there, we wouldn't get to where we are today, and that's having a good geologic understanding of this deposit to be able to explore for it, extend the zone, and better understand it so we've got future exploration targets in the area, which we're going to go over in detail. As my old boss used to say, Henrik Fellenius, there's no substitution for good data. I don't think this resource estimate would have been completed without all of the diamond drilling that we've done since October 12th of last year until August 6th of this year. That's really given us the information to build out a resource that we actually have confidence in.
When you look at how we capped, when you look at how we project between holes, without that data, we would have never been able to do it. Really, what has changed since December 18? We've changed the geologic interpretation. That's just not the resource models, but the structures, the hosting lithologies, we've done all of that to better guide us how this deposit formed, where would the mineralization be going along certain structures. Therefore, when we model this now, we have confidence in it, where I think in December of last year, we really didn't have confidence in that resource. I'm happy where we are today. To take a quote from Duncan about a snapshot in time, I think we are at a snapshot in time still for this deposit. We're still drilling, we're still finding more gold outside of the resource.
I think it was critical at this time to get this resource estimate out there so we could get rid of that December resource and say, "Look, this is really where we are in this A Zone, and it's growing and it's getting better." Look, it's been pretty fabulous for us. When you look at the image there, you can sort of see we've also been looking on updating the resources in other areas, the South Zone, the S50 zones, the VC zones, and really you can notice that this is all around workings. This is all going to be part of a potential restart here, and this is why we want to better define all of them.
As we go forward here, a lot of work is going to be drilling of A Zone, but also getting the other zones up and ready for mining. As part of that, you can sort of see where our new 79 Level development is going. We chased the A Zone up plunge. When we got above the 1,050 Level, it looks like it's a little more folded. We're still getting high-grade hits there, but again, we were blowing our mind out trying to drill it from 67 Level from a drilling platform that probably wasn't optimal. We said, "Hey, let's put in that 79-meter Level development halfway in between 670 and 1,050, and that'll allow us to drill that area off much easier." As well, it gives us an opportunity to further drill off the VC zones.
What's interesting here is, as we've been drilling off those zones, we've had some pretty high-grade hits from VC and VC1. What we're sort of seeing overall for the mine is up near surface, the material that was mined out, it was wider zones. It's brecciated mafic volcanics, a lot of sulfide mineralization, disseminated gold. As we're getting to depth, it seems like somewhere around, we go through a transition zone, maybe around 800, 900 meters down, and it's turning into more discrete structures, shear structures, that host quartz veins with visible gold. That means that opens up all the VC for visible gold, which we are finding there now, as well as the North Zone and the 338 Zone to the north that we haven't even touched, plus a lot of other zones in this area.
If they all follow that pattern, then they're all going to have high-grade zones underneath them. It's, I guess, not unlike things you might see at Hoyle Pond, where they had a more branch type, then as you get deeper, it kind of gets into one unique structure. That makes for good gold mineralization. Anyway, we're starting to understand it. We had University of Western Ontario here this year. They had a student there all year. We've taken a lot of samples, and we're looking at the gold mineralization, the quartz veining in particular, to find out, just better understand this. Are there some clues in this zone that's going to help us later explore for more of these A Zone type structures? We think there are, and we'll sort of see that as we go through the presentation.
Really where we are, you can see historically over 6,000 holes here. It's been drilled a lot, but a lot of that's in the mined out area. There's over 700 holes now that we're using in this resource estimate. There's about 20 mineralized zones in these other areas, the S50 south zones and whatnot, and then four zones that have been modeled for the Kiena Deep A Zone. Really, we closed up the data in August 6th. The five drills we have there right now are still going. We're still getting good hits, which we're going to release publicly at some point down the road here, but up plunge and down plunge. We're still really happy with things are going.
I think that as we get the 79-meter level developed, when that's ready, I think we'll add to the drilling capacity that we have there, bring in a couple more rigs, and really get this thing ready for the next resource estimate, which could be near the end of the year or early in 2020. Really we have that up plunge area. We know we have the holes. We just need the drilling, and when that's done, we'll update the resource with that. Again, that has a big impact on a restart and the economics of this project. We're pretty excited about that. You can see that we've added about another 140 drill holes so far since October of last year, and that's in some of the other zones.
Really, 66 new holes in the Kiena Deep A Zone, which is just about double what we had there before. We've really added a lot here. A lot of it was infill drilling. I guess we could have always taken the big step outs and tried to do that, what we thought this was a good deposit, we really want to get it to a stage where we understand it well and something that we can get into a pre-feas as fast as we can to convert these to reserves and be able to make a production decision. I'm sure you've seen some of these slides before. Just as a quick reminder here, this is the long section of the deposit.
You can see the mafic volcanics in the hanging wall and the komatiite or ultramafic, sheared ultramafic in the footwall, and the A Zone really occurs along that contact. This has been extended now over 700 meters down plunge, and it is very straight and very continuous, and I think that's going to make it really nice to mine. One of the things that we wanted to do in this infill drilling is not just for building a resource estimate, but we wanted to test the continuity of the geometry. When we go in here and mine this thing, is it going to be torn apart or boudinaged or locally folded, something that's going to interfere with the mining of the zone? I think we've proven to ourselves that this thing holds together. We've got a good zone.
It varies anywhere in thickness from three to 10 meters, say. Obviously, we've had some thicker areas where it flattens out in some spots, I think that's really going to bode well for us when we come to mine this. Now we're going through a geotech review, a detailed geotech review as part of our PEA that we're doing. This will be able to guide us on stope size and what we're going to need for ground support and things like that. As we start to look at how we mine this out and what's the production rate we could get out of this, it's all going to come from how well this holds together, what are the size of the stopes, and what will the rock there allow us to open up. That's all ongoing as part of this PEA.
I think it's a PEA, but really there's a lot of aspects of this PEA we're going to be doing to a level that's much beyond the detail required in a PEA, but that just will make the PFS go a lot faster later on next year. In cross-section, you can see, again, the folded nature here, and it's plunging down. Essentially, take a piece of paper, fold it up, put a plunge to it, and that's really what the zone looks like. It's been consistent over 700 meters. It certainly seems consistent going to depth. Up plunge now, that structure still exists, but now it's been folded, it looks like by a later stage fold, so it's a little bit harder to chase, but certainly the gold values are there.
That's what we're trying to sort out now with the drilling that we'll be doing from 79 level. Really on this 3D image, this is taken from our last press release, just to put you into perspective where the 1050 level is. You can see where we've been focusing the drilling, infill drilling. That's really, we wanted to better understand this deposit and its geometry and the continuity of that, and at depth. It is deep, but we have fantastic results from down there, so it's hard to walk away from that. In fact, we think the A zone, where it plunges down eventually, because these structures are It's a linking structure, maybe a second or third order structure that links two regional shears. When they come into the shear, we think that could be the best area to look.
Down plunge of this A Zone should intersect the regional shear that hosts the Kiena deposit above, and that may be a really great area for us. Again, that's why we want to deepen this particular ramp on 1050 to be able to better drill that area. Also, again, it sets us up for future development and mining of the higher grade A Zone. Okay. One important aspect of the resource estimate is, I think previously, of course, the drill spacing was too far apart. In fact, when we did the resource estimate last time, we had a search ellipse that wouldn't even reach the other hole, so that we had uninterpolated blocks in a lot of areas of the model in between some drill area.
When that happens, you start to get an average grade for those blocks that is really lower than the average grade. The infill drilling helped a lot here, but what we really did was we wanted to separate out what really isn't mineralized. You have a structure, you might have a quartz vein, but really, where is the gold mineralization? Where did the gold precipitate out? We were able to define that boundary with the more drilling, and that's what you see as the white dashed line on that figure. That's low grade. It's not part of the mineralizing population, so let's just get rid of that stuff because it's not part of the same process of how it was mineralized. If you go from 50 grams to zero grams along an edge, obviously that's not part of the same system.
I think what you can run into with this problem, if you don't try to have a hard boundary in there, is when you have 50 grams and then you have a zero gram somewhere, you get a lot of moderate blocks in between, like 25 grams, at a much higher tonnage. That's gold ounces that you're going to think you're going to go in and mine above a cutoff grade that's much lower, say three grams per ton, and you're just not going to do that. I think that's where you can kind of fool yourself about the number of ounces. We want to make sure we limited the high-grade area so it didn't bleed out into other areas and give that false number. That's really what we did.
I think what's important about this is when we did this, part of the problem before in the old model, we had a bimodal distribution. It's impossible to cap two populations at the same time with one cap. When you look at a histogram, you get this sort of camel back look to it. That's impossible. When this domaining was done and it really separated out the populations. When you get a single log normal bell curve, you say, "Oh, I can easily figure out where the cap is on this now." That helped a lot in determining the right cap. It gave us a lot of confidence because we had the data to do it. When you see that bell curve, you know it's one population.
Okay, I won't go through this in too much detail, but I wanted to give you an example of, remember, there's 20 zones in the rest of the Kiena Mine area, and there's four in Kiena. Imagine there's 24 zones here. We looked at the capping for each one. We looked at the variography for each one. They all had separate grade interpolations, the whole bit. You can imagine Bruno and Karine here had a lot of long days trying to go through all this information, but having the data to do it made it possible. Really, when we look at the capping strategy, it's pretty straightforward. You don't want to have a couple of samples hold all your metal, right? Really, we look at it and we said, "Well, look, there's 30% of the metal in this resource based on 1% of samples.
Doesn't seem right." We made sure that any one composite didn't have more than 10% of the metal. That was an important thing. How do you get down to that? Well, you have to look at the grade population. You see the probability plot in the top right corner. You look for breaks in the probability plot. You look at the coefficient of variation in the top left corner. You can see that for the A Zone here, when we did the cap, we capped about 3% of the composites. These are 1-meter composites, which is very close to the length of the assays. We did look at the assay averages versus the composite averages and whatnot, but they were pretty similar because the sample length is almost always 1 meter. I think we've put any argument there to bed.
Even with the capping that we've done, you can see we've taken off 30% of the metal just from an arithmetic evaluation. You'll see later we've actually done this work in the block model, so you can see what it actually is in a block model. How much gold did we lose at each step, the grade capping? I think that's important, because if you got the grade capping right or not, then you can say there's an opportunity or maybe not. Really, this is how we went through it, and I think that something that was really different here is you can see the cap here is for 165 for Kiena, the A Zone, which is the top zone, which is the well-mineralized zone. By, of course, 165 grams per ton, I guess for a lot of deposits I worked on, probably would've scared me.
At Eagle, we have a cap of 145, and it's way undercalling the mineralization we're getting out of 303 zone, and this zone is better. Certainly don't have any problem with that cap. What we wanted to do, again, was to make sure we looked at the population, we said, "Okay, well, is there any other breaks in the curve?" Karine really spent a lot of time on this, and you can sort of see we have what's called a high-grade limit at 100 grams per ton. The reasons that is there is so when we do interpolation, you got a block, you're trying to put a grade in that block, it's searching for drill holes for data.
What we're saying is, look, if you have to search too far, maybe a cap of 165, it might be right, but let's be maybe a touch conservative here, and let's say that any values, and I'll show you this when we get into the second and third pass here, later in the interpolation profiles I'll show you. We take all those values and everything over 100, and we zero them out. That's it. We just zip. Not to say we're being overly conservative, but everywhere where we have good spacing, tight drilling, we're happy with 165 grams per ton because that's what it is. Anywhere where the drill spacing gets a little further, we're saying, "Take it out. If it's higher than 100, make it zero." You know what? That's going to give us some opportunities for later.
I can show you on the sensitivities, you can see what those numbers are. Really it says, "Hey, go back in there and drill this off properly, then we'll know for sure." We don't want any surprises when we get into this beast and start mining it out. Okay? That was really the strategy and a lot of great work here at site. If we look at, here's the A1 zone. Again, the cap is 110. The high-grade limit is 55. When we go down, we split this A2 zone into two separate areas. Obviously, a lot less data, and this is one of the issues. It's great to get to the A zone, which holds about 60% or 70% of the gold ounces in the A zone. It's right at the contact between the mafic and the underlying schist.
No problem, we drill in there, good rock qualities in the mafics. No problem to find that zone. When we try to push it through the schist, it's a little harder to get through, especially from some of the platforms we've had in the past, which probably weren't optimal. We have a lot less data to work with. That's why we have a lot less data here to work with in these zones. For this zone here, cap at 50. No need for a high-grade limit because the cap's already at 50. We get to the bottom part there, we have a cap of 200 and a high-grade limit of 50. When you do the first, the second, and third passes, of course, all those values get zeroed out.
We're not overstepping what we think is contained in these deposits. The same approach was used everywhere for every zone. We're pretty consistent that way. Just to give you an overall look at how the range varies. You can see in the upper part of the mine, the grade caps are anywhere from 15-20. When you start getting into the A Zone, of course, they're much higher. You can see the mean grades there, without capping, they're 700,000, 800,000, 400,000. It's just a lot of high grade in this zone, and we want to just make sure we dealt with that correctly so we're not overestimating everywhere. Okay? Variography. I just want to show this, that again, you can sort of see the nice lognormal distribution here, the bell shape. This is what we used for doing the variography.
We did it for every zone. Pretty comfortable with what we came up with for where the direction of maximum continuity was. It gave us a really good feel for what the continuity is. When we put that into the block model, it's following some science here about why we're putting the grades in these models. Really, when we look at a variogram, without going into detail how this really works, is the top line is really your total variability of the population, and the nugget, which is the part on the left-hand side where that curve actually intersects the Y-axis. That is called the nugget, and that's the local variability. If you took two samples really close together, how much would they change?
You could see that nugget is very low, which means if I drill a hole here and I drill a hole here, they're going to be pretty close, which most deposits or a lot of deposits I worked on in the past, you drill 10 holes, four of them have good gold, six of them don't have any. You look at the variography, and that nugget might be 40% or 50% of the total variance of the population. Here it's very low. That means there's good continuity in the gold grade. You can believe it. If it's there, you can believe it. When you go to mine it there, it's going to be there. I think that's an important aspect of this deposit. That probably explains why when we drilled the first 50 holes into this deposit, 48 had visible gold.
It's just a very continuous zone of mineralization. I think that's really positive, and that's why we're getting such great resource grades now is because there's just a lot of high grade, and it joins up from hole to hole. Right? I think we're pretty happy with that. Just to give you a little bit of how we handle, how this high-grade limit comes into effect here. You can see in the red square, this would be the interpolation parameters for the A Zone. You can sort of see in pass number one at the top, the search radius is 26 sort of in one plane, 30 in the other, and 10 across the thickness. Not a real great sort of plunge, the mineralization on that plunging sheet that we have. That's good. Again, fairly regular distribution there.
The way that the first pass works within that. We had to have, you can see, we had to have a minimum of 12 composites, and that means that four from any one hole. We had to have three holes within that range, 26 by 30, to interpolate a grade into that block unrestricted. It uses the cap of 165. When we look at the next line down, you can see, so we expand the range. It goes from 40 to 40 to 10. Now we have to have two holes. You look on the far side there, it says 26, 30, 10, which was the original variogram range. If there's any values over 100 in that pass, in that area, it's zero. That's how that high-grade limit works. The farther you get away from a hole, the harder we hit it.
That's why we're pretty comfortable with this resource estimate. In the inferred especially, we think there's a lot of opportunity for upside. That's how we use that high-grade limit, which they've used at some other deposits in the area. Okay. And really, this is just a sketch of the 3D block model. This is for the A Zone. What's sort of interesting here is that we actually had to have, because of this A Zone, we had to change our company grade scale to put in something over 50, which is a bit weird. Like I said, it would've scared me before, but seeing the values we got at Eagle, I mean, this is just a high-grade deposit. I think that was a pleasant sort of surprise.
Really, how we did the resource classification, you can see now we're somewhere around 50/50, and before around 30% had indicated. We have a lot more data and a lot better understanding of this deposit. Really, the drilling has to be 25-meter space drilling, and we have to be able to find three holes, or there's no way it's getting into indicated, really. Then the inferred is something where we have a wider range of, say, 80, but still have to have two holes. That's why, because of that longer range, obviously, we don't have as much drilling out there. That's why we wanted to hit the high grade stuff a little bit harder, and that's why we put the high-grade limit in there. Okay.
When we look at the classification, just to really show you the process here, on the left-hand side you can sort of see that's what pops out of the model for what we find for the interpolated during the past one. We don't like to see isolated blocks of anything, so we go through and manually group it together. I mean, it's inferred or it's indicated, it's one or the other, but it's not block by block, isolated bits. They have to form regular shaped zones of similar categorization. That's what we see here. Just for a comparison, this is A Zone. You can sort of see A Zone, best drilled, highest grade, large part of the resource, and the majority of the ounces here, we do have up to indicated.
When we look down at A2 Zone, you can see we have a lot less indicated, and that's just a function of not getting enough holes into this. As we have a lot of inferred there, you can imagine a lot of the high-grade hits that we had down there have been whacked hard, I would say, or conservatively maybe. Say, look, when we get more drilling in here, these zones are going to improve as well. We're going to get better grades and more ounces as we do more drilling. There's a reward for going through all that work. Really, just a quick look at the cutoff grade. We're using the CAD 1,700, which is probably a bit low for today, or maybe not, depends how far the gold's come down in the last hour here.
$1,300, and really that works out to be about three grams per ton for us, the way we envision that we would mine this out. We're reporting all these resources at three grams per ton. I'll show you a slide here in a bit. The average grade is so much higher than the cutoff grade, whether it's 2 or 5 or 4, it's not really going to make much difference here anyway, because you're in ore or you're out of ore, and that's really the function of this new A Zone. When we look at these resources, and it's important here to note that this is all over three meters thickness.
Nowhere in this model, and we made sure of this by taking out the geology solids, putting them in the Leapfrog, bringing them back in the Gemcom, to make sure that there's no areas that are less than three meters thickness. We want to make sure that we've kind of already have some sort of mine ability built into this. Obviously, dilution will be added in any assessment for future mining. At least we're at three meters to start with, which is really what we do at Eagle. It can be done, and trying to limit the dilution when we go forward. Really, where did we get to? The Kiena Deep A Zone indicated resources went from about CAD 100,000 to CAD 400,000, so that's kind of a four-bagger, I guess. That's pretty good.
On the inferred, we went from about 240 up to 330, which is good. The grade has really been fantastic. You've gone from under 10 to over 18, and that's really spectacular. I mean, really these are the kind of numbers that we thought we would sort of be seeing in our first resource estimate back in December, just from the drill hole data, but we just didn't get there because we just didn't have enough data. Now we have the data, and we're very comfortable with these grades because we have the drilling, and we have a good understanding, and I think we haven't been optimistic, I don't think, at any stage of this process. We've been realistic or conservative in some aspects even. Really, we've gone from a 50% of the A Zone being indicated Or 30% previously to about 50% now.
It's good. We have lots more drilling to do. Obviously, we still have 50% that aren't indicated. That's going to be some of the continued drilling going forward here. Again, just a summary here. You can see, I guess it was mentioned in the slides before, but just to reference, under the blue line to what we had previously, big increases in the number of ounces and the average grades for both indicated and inferred. When we look at the whole Kiena Mine area, really, we've got about 450,000 ounces in indicated at just under 15 grams, and inferred another 400,000 at 11. That's a lot of ounces that are right accessible to our workings, and obviously, that's going to grow as we continue to drill.
That chart on the, or table on the lower right corner there, if you look at the different cutoff grades, you can see it's relatively insensitive to small changes in cutoff grade, and that's just because the average grade is so much higher. Whatever that cutoff grade changes to based on gold price or whatever, it doesn't matter. We're going to mine those ounces. Additionally, outside of the Kiena Mine area, some areas are easier to access than others. This includes things like the Wesdome Deposit and Martin and Dubuisson and P resqu'île. There's still another 340,000 ounces in indicated and 400,000 ounces in inferred. These are zones we're going to get to and evaluate. This is other things that we can bring into production at some point down the road here.
All of these zones are going to now get a second look because we have something different that we're looking for in these areas. Really, a lot of these zones just need more drilling as well. We haven't really concentrated on them because we've got the Kiena Deep A Zone to worry about and the in-mine area first. There is a large amount of ounces that are sitting out there that would certainly help when this project gets started back up again. When we look at the global, of course, we've got about almost 800,000 ounces at 8.7 in the indicated and another 800,000, 8.5 in the inferred. A lot of ounces that are really good grade, and that's including everything on the property.
Some of the old low-grade zones at four or five grams per ton or whatever, it's all in there and all averages out at eight and a half. Not a bad start here. This is the sensitivity tables here. Maybe a little bit hard to read out there. Really, can I see that table, Tony?
Yeah.
We tried to compare a couple of different things, cap and uncapped. I'll just pick a zone, try to do that. I'll pick the A Zone. When you go to the top left, we have uncut and restricted. Really, when we look at that, we had it restricted. We went from essentially 380,000 ounces at 23 grams to, sorry, 27 grams. When we cut that, of course, we come out to 21 grams per ton and 290,000 ounces. Just on that zone, that is well drilled off. When we remove the cap, it goes down to 290, so we add about 90,000 ounces there that we knocked off from the cap. Pretty significant. We take the next table down, it goes from, this is the biggest hit because this is gold that's capped, that's restricted.
We compare it with gold uncut and unrestricted, this would be the biggest difference. Even in that zone, you can see we go from 290,000 ounces to 415,000 ounces. If we were too hard on the cap or if we were too hard on that restriction, there's still meat on the bones there that we're going to get when we go back in and better drill this off. I think when you look at the last table down, on the last line, this is sort of the A2 zone, because this is the one that really has a lot of inferred. When you take something that is capped, they're both capped on either side here on this last line, but one is unrestricted.
You see the difference it makes for the A2 Zone for inferred, we go from 166,000 ounces up to 250, and grade goes from 16-22. Because the drill spacing is far apart there, having a restriction hits it the hardest. You can see 170-250 is another 30% of ounces we can get there. Again, more meat on the bones, and it just means we got to get out there and properly drill it, and then we'll add that in. I think where we go from here is we drill all this material up, we add this additional inferred and indicated, we get more ounces that way, and then we also have the drills running to extend in the up-plunge area. We're extending in the down-plunge area where we're hitting.
That's why I say it's sort of a snapshot in time because really we see this thing growing and just needs the drilling. It's always just get the drilling done and we're going to increase that capacity going forward here. If you look at the next slide here, it's really the next steps and really it's the five drills. They're ongoing. We want to drill along the plunge line, of course. We want to drill the other zones to improve their level of confidence or the categories for incorporation in the pre-feas. I think one thing that's really important here is this developing the 79-meter level, and this is really to give us access into the up plunge area of the A Zone between 1,050 and 67-meter level. Really, we're putting that in.
We have enough high grade hits there that putting this ramp in is really a slam dunk for us to do that, because it's going to be great, and that's going to give us access not only to the A, but the VC zones that dip, which seem to be turning into these high grade quartz veins. That's really awesome. Really, this resource space will go in to do the PEA that we're expected sometime in the new year. Like I said, a lot of aspects of that are going to be up to the pre-feas level. Really when this 79 meter level development bin, which is going to take another three months or so, right, Marc-André? About three months or so.
After that, those guys are going down to the main ramp, the 1050 ramp we've been doing all our drilling from, and we're going to start driving that down to give us better platforms for the future, give us access for bulk sampling in the future, and also that can be used for production. If everything works out the way we planned, we've got the 79, the 67, 79, 1050, and we'll have something below that for immediate access to get started on. Already we're going to be starting with a lot of working areas. You can see that this will, when it starts up here, we'll be ready to go. The other thing is I should maybe go to this next slide here. You can sort of see where, again, where that new 79 meter level development is going.
You can see our interpretation coming up there. They merge into the VC, but there's folding, there may be some offsets in between, but like I said, we've had some very good hits there, and we're excited to get in there and do the drilling. What's nice is if we have VC1 coming down through this area, VC6 coming down through this area, and the A Zone going up, albeit folded or not, the ounces per vertical meter is going to go up a lot. I think with the ounces that we have on the books now, I think we're north of 1,200 ounces per vertical meter. Pretty good start for getting going. That's not including a lot of little structures that we haven't even modeled yet. Pretty important. The other thing that's of interest is we just hired on another person at Kiena.
She's our surface exploration geologist, and really, she's putting together all the historic data, and really her goal is to track down more of these zones. You can see everybody's drilled this deposit or this area off on structures that are essentially east-west. You can quite clearly see that the old Kiena deposit and the VC zone and the North Zone, 338 Zone, and now the new A Zone are trending closer to north-south. We think there's more based on the geophysics that we have there. We've had Dave Reese in there to help us out. He believes that the structure is real, and we see them in the mag, and you can see where we've sort of maybe highlighted a couple of them where we think they're trending on this map. Really, it's a matter of just getting out there.
We have showings on these structures, was it drilled the wrong way? Does it need more work? That's what we're going to be doing with our surface exploration program. Really, we're going to have that going on next year as well. It's already started this year, and it's defined, again, additional mineralization or additional A Zone style of mineralization that we can easily access maybe from the underground. With that, I'll pass it over to Duncan.
Yeah. Great. Well, thanks very much, Mike. It's hard not to get excited about what's going on here at Kiena Mine, I'll tell you that. I guess at this point, really, and just in summary here, again, reiterating the mid-tier status that we aspire to. The jurisdictions we're in are low risk, really, in terms of Québec and Ontario. Everything's built. We're optimizing Wawa. Infrastructure's fantastic and permitted at Kiena Mine. Just really looking for the next deposit we're next to mine. Really highly executable. I'd have to say that the team we've been able to attract into Wesdome is exemplary, and I think that really the development of us into the next phase, I think, is quite likely. I congratulate everybody. Karine and Bruno, I think that that's a fantastic job. Mike, you've done a great job, and everybody else on the team.
With that, I think we can open it up for questions. If you have any technical questions, I've got a panel full of experts up here, which is good because I'm the mining engineer and just looking where to break the rock, right, Marc-André? Anyways, if there's any questions here in the audience, that would be great. Yes, Mr. Topping.
Yeah, I was just asking on the actual true width that you're finding in the resource. What is the average?
Michael, You guys have.
Yeah.
Yeah, average true width. Yeah.
It's around four meter for A Zone.
Four meter for A Zone.
Yeah.
Yes.
Within that four meter average, is there many samples where you have less than two meters minimum so that you can get the validation that you need?
Yeah, the A zone varies in width, thickness? Yes, sorry. Yes, the A zone varies in thickness. In some area, it's very thick with high grade, but in other zones, there's less than three meters with high grade. Yeah, in some case, they will have a dilution.
Is it very few cases or is it-
It's few cases for A Zone, particularly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fewer cases, yeah.
Few.
Few. Okay. Thank you.
Yes, Don. Thank you. We're just going to get a mic to you. There you go. Yes. Thanks. Could you describe how the dimensions of the resource have changed from the maiden resource to this? I'm talking along the vertical extent along plunge, for instance. Yes. Of the A zone.
Okay.
Along axis. Yeah. I think it was quoted as 400 m with the maiden resource. Yes. I know you've done a lot of infill drilling here, so I'm just trying to understand if this increase in grade is largely due to infill drilling, or to what extent has the footprint expanded to?
In last December, there were already some depth holes that were not included because they were too far from the main body. With the infill, we were able to include those depth holes, so it extended the length of the zone.
We have about 700 meters of plunge now within the resource, I believe. Up significantly from the 400 or 450. Really the next goal for us is to get that up, and a 790 drift is a very important aspect, and we'll be done that shortly, I'd say in the next six weeks to two months. It's going to be an ideal drill platform for us to get that out. I don't really understand what the upper plunge is and how the VC zone and the A Zone relate to each other. It looks really, if you ask me, it kind of looks like a wishbone. We'll be right in the middle of the wish bone in order to get both limbs of it. Okay. Maybe just a couple of administrative things.
I see under the next steps that it indicates that the PEA will be based off of this resource, yet I also heard that there might even be a resource update by the end of the year. What are your thoughts there? Are you actually going to put a resource out by the end of the year, and would you base the PEA off that, or what should we think? No, I don't expect to have another resource update by the end of 2019, you mean? Yeah, when is the next resource update? Yeah. I think when we get a substantial amount of drilling done, and I think to get established on the 79 drilling platform in order to understand that. Let's face it, we've got some great mineralization at depth here. What we see at 1550 down to 1600 is phenomenal, and I just referenced this hole 6299.
We look at the A2 zone, and at that point, at that depth, I think the intercept we got there was like 77 grams over 14 meters. We're very excited to get down there. We also see a point of inflection where it starts to flatten out. We all love that because we know that tons of dilation and some great gold. Really the plan for us right now is let's establish 790 and let's get the up plunge understood into the VC zones. The development crew is not taking a break. They're going to go right to the bottom of the ramp and try to get us out to the, I would say, more to the east in order that we are able to better define that area down below.
I would say comfortably at the next resource, we would definitely have incorporated much better information within the A2, which I see as being a really good event for us because I think there's great mineralization down there. That would probably be the next course of action. What I'd say about the PEA right now, I think we're really looking at the metallurgical aspects right now. Obviously, Kiena Mine was a four and a half gram. There's no gravity circuit in there at all. Definitely we probably need to add something like that. We're also looking at the geotechnical aspect of it. We do have some komatiite schist in the footwall there. We need to understand how best to deal with it. The A Zone, thankfully, has got a great basalt hanging wall, so that's not an issue for us. That's good.
Environmentally, of course, we're looking at those aspects. As Mike said, I think a lot of the aspects of the PEA are actually going to be at a PFS level. It's going to be quite quick for us to turn the switch over to the next level on that. I don't know if that answers your question, but I think the current resource we have right now is certainly going to feed into the PEA. Super. Maybe just one final question then. How should we model the timing of a restart? Should we look ahead to maybe Q1 2021, or it sounds like there's a few moving parts still. I'm going to go back to my forward-looking statement and point that out.
Depending on how the PEA goes, this is going to define us with the best next steps, okay, as to what to do. Really as we speak right now, I don't see the development stopping at Kiena Mine right now. We're developing right now and the next phase of developing the down ramp is to get, number 1, a better exploration platform, it also gains us depth, which we need to do in order to get production. I would love to be in some form of pre-production based on the right conditions occurring and the stars aligning, hopefully by the end of 2020. That's a very forward-looking statement right now without having the PEA in front of us, the results of that. I think that that would be a little guessy, I think, right now. Yep. Thanks. Will you do a pre-feas or a feas?
As Michael mentioned, we would probably do a pre-feas in order to upgrade our resources into reserves. Again, the PEA is going to give us some sort of semblance of capital outlay. I've been the guy for the last year thinking that really we don't have a lot of investment to do in the mill or the infrastructure. Really, the investment we need to do here is in mine development in order to access the reserves. I've got a hard time, when I talk about pre-production, I simply mean that amount of money to get this thing into a sort of self-generating, self-sustaining cash flow situation. I have a hard time right now seeing above CAD 50 million-CAD 60 million. Currently, if conditions stay the same, I think that Eagle River is going to be able to fund the majority of that.
It's certainly a good situation we have. Yes, George.
Yeah, just to follow up. Do you have your eye on an area where you would start a bulk sample, and what do you have to do to get there?
Well, if you look at the resource right now, we do have some of the resource coming through just above the sort of 1050 elevation. Obviously, that would be kind of just drive straight ahead and you could get into it. I'm not sure without really looking at the resource at that point, but yeah, bulk sample certainly is a great way, and it really has a good look at our capping levels and see what sort of recovery we get. I think I'd like to have a gravity circuit in place at the Kiena Mill prior to doing that, though, as I think that that's going to be an important aspect of our milling here, so. Great. Well, we're all out of questions here in Toronto.
Without further ado, I'd like to thank everybody for attending, and thanks to management, and of course, thanks to Karine and Bruno for coming from Val-d'Or. Again, they're available for questions after this, but this will conclude the formal part of the webcast. Thanks very much for joining us.