The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Drills tap widest mineralized intercepts so far at BC project North of 60 Mining News – November 13, 2020
Drilling at the southern end of Cliff Creek has underscored the gold and silver resource building potential of this zone on the Lawyers project in Northern BC.
Benchmark Metals Inc. Nov. 9 reported that long sections of gold and silver mineralization tapped at the southern end of Cliff Creek has underscored the resource building potential of this zone on the company's Lawyers project in Northern British Columbia.
"Infill drilling at the south end of Cliff Creek has generated significant, long intersections of gold-silver mineralization. This area is providing multiple new benefits that include more gold and silver than anticipated and at higher grades," said Benchmark Metals CEO John Williamson.
Lawyers is home to a small underground mining operation that produced 171,200 ounces of gold and 3.6 million oz of silver over a four-year period beginning in 1989.
This historical mining, carried out by Cheni Gold Mines, included production from the Cliff Creek, Phoenix, and AGB zones.
These deposits were never fully mined, nor the surrounding area thoroughly explored, and Benchmark has identified additional high-grade and bulk tonnage gold-silver targets within the central area of Lawyers trend, a more than 20-kilometer- (12.4 miles) long prospective corridor that runs across the property.
The latest batch of results are from drilling at Cliff Creek, where Benchmark has defined a 200-meter thick zone of gold-silver mineralization from surface to depths of more than 550 meters, and for more than over 1,200 meters along strike.
Benchmark says this drilling has intersected the broadest zones of mineralization so far at Lawyers.
Highlights from this drilling at the southern end of Cliff Creek include:
• 128.1 meters averaging 1.65 grams per metric ton gold and 110 g/t silver in hole 20CCDD028, including 6.9 meters averaging 6.9 g/t gold and 731.9 g/t silver.
• 221.5 meters averaging 0.82 g/t gold and 15.16 g/t silver in hole 20CCDD024, including one meter averaging 20.7 g/t gold and 64.9 g/t silver.
In addition to expanding the size of Cliff Creek, this drilling is expected to upgrade the resource contained within this Lawyers deposit.
"Drilling in the southern end is providing substantial continuity and extending gold-silver mineralization to greater depths," said Williamson. "Our current drill density of between 15-35 meters, averaging 20 meters, is significantly increasing the confidence level of our new mineral resource estimate expected in early 2021."
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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