Here's my understanding of the current status of Windfall.
The primary purpose of the ramp and drifting was not to mine the gold, but to permit access to the known mineralized regions to later mine the gold.
During the ramping, unknown mineralized regions were discovered. I'm sure we all remember that photo with the visible gold, taken from a ramp area 10 meters above where they expected to find anything.
Surely, some of the ramp and drift muck contains gold, perhaps some significant amounts from the drifts, but the real point was to create an access route. In the drift areas particularly, visible gold was seen to go off in all directions, as I recall from the last Windfall news release. That's the nature of vein gold. Now they need to do underground hydraulic drilling, to try and determine the direction, depth, and grade of the veins. They also talked about more diamond drilling, both from surface and underground. The W3/hole 100 52/oz gold zone will be accessed by directed blasting from the existing drift(s). They would have intentionally missed the high-grade zone with the drift(s), so they can later blast through the entire volume where they expect the veins to run.
Because of the nature of vein gold, it's incredibly difficult to estimate resources beyond inferred status, because continuity just can't be demonstrated without an incredible amount of drilling. It's a heck of a lot cheaper to do underground drilling/sampling from open drifts than it is to diamond drill from the surface. Moreover, they can use that new information to go directly to mining the gold, if and when that time comes.
In summary, Windfall is on the verge of proving itself a viable gold mine (IMHO), but the most important information has not yet been obtained, the underground drilling and assaying.
Just my thinking on the subject.
Lar
