SKN eyes more ground near Boka (August 15, 2003)

Vancouver SKN Resources (SRL-V) has added 24.6 km of ground to its already impressive land holdings around Southwestern Resources‘ (SWG-T) Boka gold project in China’s Yunnan province.

Dubbed Tuobuka, the new project lies 2-km south of the Boka 7 zone and is a joint venture Kunming Gold Exploration Engineering, a subsidiary of a Chinese national organization.

Mineralization on the property is hosted in Middle Proterozoic carbonaceous shales and calcareous siltstones within a strata-bound thrust zone of ductile-brittle shearing. Previous work identified a north-south striking zone, which yielded surface values of 3.6 grams gold per tonne over 13 metres and 48.4 grams gold over 0.8 metre.

The new partners aim to complete a regional soil survey in preperation for drilling.

Under the deal, SKN can earn an 80% stake by making undisclosed cash payments over 3 years.

Last month, the junior picked up four exploration permit applications covering 380 sq.-km to the west of the Boka gold project. The application area, known as the Huidong project, adjoins SKN’s Dongchuan project across the Jinsha Jiang river in Yunnan province.

Southwestern generated interest in the area following the release of wide spread gold values from Boka. The company picked up the Yunnan province property in Sept. of last year following a two month exploration program that included stream sediment sampling and rock chip sampling covering an 800 sq. km area. The stream sediment geochemical data outlined a 15-km anomaly within the drainage containing the Boka 1 through 7 gold zones, which host a stratabound mineralized horizon that attracted artisanal miners in 2001. The small scale miners have dug more than 130 tunnels into the mountainside and subsequent exploration by Southwestern led to the discovery of 4 more gold zones within the Boka project area, all of which occur within a 25 km long structural zone and are confined to a specific stratigraphic horizon.

The most promising area is the Boka 1 zone, which consists of two sets of tunnels, dubbed North and South, that have been excavated along a gold zone extending for 1.4 km along strike and exposed vertically for 150 metres along a west facing slope. Tunneling, which vary from 20-to-200 metres in length and both crosscut the general trend of mineralisation as well as running parallel to it, has shown that the gold mineralization continues down dip for at least 200 metres and is open in all directions. Southwestern’s initial task was to sample the tunnels and by early Dec., the project first caught the eye of investment community when the junior reported values of up to 75.2 grams gold per tonne over 34.5 metres.