Jasper raises cash, buys land

It’s shaping up to be an eventful week for Jasper Mining (JSP-V). The Calgary-based junior exploration company added to its steady stream of news this month by announcing two private placements and the acquisition of four more land tenures.

The private placements — the first of which was announced on Wednesday and the second on Thursday — generated roughly $550,000. In total Jasper had raised roughly $4.3 million in the last eight months.

The newly acquired land will effectively bridge together the company’s McFarlane and Lydy properties in southern B.C.

The tenures total 1,885 hectares and were snapped up after positive geochemical results were found in soil samples. With the new acquisitions the McFarlane property now totals 2,869 hectares.

Jasper’s president Gordon Dixon says the property has the potential to be an “excellent (molybdenum) property,” as the area is an extension of the Eagle Plains property. Eagle Plains’ Sphinx property lies northeast of McFarlane, and 14 drill holes there have returned molybdenum mineralization associated with a surface exposure. A subsurface of granitic material has been previously documented on the property, according to a Jasper press release.

“The results at (Eagle Plains) have indicated there very well could be a very large deposit,” Dixon says.

In the same press release the company says the property holds weakly anomalous molybdenum less than or equal to 2.8 parts per million (ppm) and copper less than or equal to 91.2 ppm. Those numbers are based on ICP analysis of about 160 soil samples.

The Lydy property is interpreted to overlie a blind cretaceous intrusion and has been the focus of limited surface sampling and a small diamond drill program during the 2005 field season.

But Jasper’s properties aren’t limited to McFarlane and Lydy. Dixon is optimistic about Jasper’s Vowell creek and Isintok holdings.

Vowell Creek is home to what Dixon describes as a “significant graphite discovery.” He says if positive assays come back from the recent 8-hole drill project, further drilling will begin next year. Dixon expects results in 10 to 15 days.

As for Isintok, Dixon is bullish on the site where Anaconda Copper drilled in the early 1980s. While Anaconda’s results were only modest, Dixon is confident that deeper diamond drilling Anaconda used reverse-circulation drilling to a depth of only 300 ft. will return significant results.

“We’ll drill Isintok no matter what,” Dixon says. Drilling is scheduled to begin in early November.

The recent spate of news from Jasper comes after many years of toil. Dixon says it took 20 years to “gather up” the claims in south-central and southeastern B.C. Jasper now has 15 to 16 properties in the area, most around the site of the former producing Columbia River mines. Dixon says the long road of acquisitions was made particularly arduous by the inefficient bureaucracies of the former B.C. government.

He credits the change in provincial governments with turning the region into a mining friendly zone and doing it without making substantive changes to laws. Instead, Dixon says, improvements have been made by streamlining and making permitting processes more efficient.

“If the (New Democratic Party) had been returned to power nothing would have been done,” Dixon says of the claims he began acquiring just before the NDP was voted out. “It’s a marvelous province to do business in now because the attitude has changed.”