The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Mining Explorers 2019 – Published Nov. 1, 2019
Alianza Minerals' exploration camp at Haldane, a high-grade silver property in Yukon's historic Keno Hill Mining District.
Jason Weber
Alianza Minerals Ltd. focused its 2019 exploration on two high-grade silver projects in the Yukon – Tim, a road-accessible property near Coeur Mining Inc.'s Silvertip Mine, and Haldane, a Keno Hill Mining District property that has long been recognized for its high-grade silver potential.
In June, Coeur Explorations Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of Coeur Mining, signed a letter of intent to explore Tim, an early staged exploration property with high-grade silver-lead-zinc mineralization similar to Coeur's Silvertip, a northern British Columbia mine about 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) to the south.
"Tim looks to be a Silvertip analog and the Coeur team is an obvious choice to move the project forward. It will be a great advantage to have Coeur's geological expertise applied to the project," said Alianza Minerals President and CEO Jason Weber.
Under the agreement, Coeur can earn a 51 percent interest in Tim by funding C$3.5 million in exploration over five years and paying Alianza C$275,000 in staged payments. Coeur will then have the option to earn 80 percent in the property by funding a positive feasibility study in the following three years and making annual payments of C$100,000.
Historical chip sampling from a trench cut across a zone of carbonate replacement mineralization at Tim returned 352 grams per metric ton silver and 9.12 percent lead across four meters. Similar mineralization was also reported in adjacent trenches 180 and 250 meters on either side of the central trench.
Resampling of the central trench in 2013 returned 365 g/t silver and 7.5 percent lead across a 3.7-meter channel sample.
Seeking high-grade silver-lead-zinc carbonate replacement mineralization reminiscent of Silvertip, Coeur's 2019 exploration at Tim included mapping, soil geochemical surveys and reopening the historic trenches.
At the same time, Alianza geologists were refining drill targets at Haldane, which is about 16 miles (25 kilometers) west of Keno City.
Underground mining that began at Haldane in 1918 produced roughly 24.7 metric tons of hand-sorted ore averaging 3,102 g/t (99.7 oz/t) silver and 59 percent lead on the south side of Bighorn Creek veins. From 1926 and 1927, a vein on the north side of Bighorn Creek produced 2.1 metric tons of hand-sorted ore averaging 4,602 g/t (148 oz/t) silver and 57.9 percent lead.
Despite this historical production, very little modern exploration has been carried out at Haldane.
Work carried out by Alianza in 2018 expanded a soil anomaly known as Ross, which is about 1,250 meters south of the historic mining. This anomaly may reflect multiple buried veins that are part of the Mount Haldane Vein System, which include the historically mined veins.
Two other anomalies – Bighorn and North Star – were discovered by Alianza last year.
The Bighorn anomaly lies 2,800 meters northwest of Mount Haldane Vein System and may represent a new set of veins in an untested area of the property.
North Star is a more than 1,000-meter-long soil anomaly situated about 1,000 meters east of Mount Haldane Vein System.
The 2019 phase I program included four trenches at the Bighorn and Mount Haldane Vein System areas.
Mineralized faults mapped at the Bighorn target were strongly weathered at surface but returned anomalous lead and silver values.
Continuous chip samples in trench BH02 returned 10.9 meters of 9.6 g/t silver, which included fault and heavily fractured and oxidized host rocks. Similar results were returned from trench BH01, 60 meters south.
Soil samples collected 300 meters south of BH01 and on strike from the trenches returned 63 g/t silver and greater than 1 percent lead. Alianza said this suggests the potential presence of high-grade silver mineralization.
The company began testing this potential with a roughly 1,300-meter drill program that got underway in August.
"The phase II program is the first drill test of these new targets and their potential to host high-grade silver veins as seen elsewhere in the Keno District," said Weber.
After testing Ross and Bighorn, the drill targeted the modelled plunge of high-grade shoots in historic workings of the Middlecoff zone at the Mount Haldane Vein System.
Alianza Minerals also investigated its KRL gold property in B.C.'s Golden Triangle with a late season program of prospecting, mapping and sampling. One of the key goals of this exploration is to determine the potential to expand the area of known high-grade mineralization at KRL, which would make it more attractive to potential earn-in partners.
Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.
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