Ventana Gold extends La Mascota zone to 625 metres

When the first set of drill results from Ventana Gold‘s (VEN-T) La Bodega gold project came in no one could believe it, says CEO Richard Warke.

“It was quite surprising,” he says from his office in Vancouver. “We knew there was potential for interesting drill results but we didn’t expect-the first hole was 106 metres of 7.8 grams … from that point on we felt that we’ve got something here that’s special.”

That was in 2006, but things haven’t changed much. Ventana is in the process of bringing in a third drill to its La Bodega project to test the strike and down-dip extension with a 3,400-metre drill program. The company is also continuing to receive promising assays from its initial 25,000metre program completed at the end of 2008.

The company has now extended the strike length of the La Mascota zone by 125 metres to a total 625 metres.

Drilling highlights include hole 91, which returned 26 metres grading 7.37 grams gold per tonne and 22 metres grading 8.68 grams gold per tonne. The intercepts were 28 metres apart and extended as deep as 233 metres depth.

Hole 94 also cut two mineralized zones. The first intercept was 22 metres grading 4.17 grams gold per tonne and the second was 81.8 metres grading 2.65 grams gold per tonne. This time mineralization was separated by about 35 metres and extended to 308 metres depth.

Ventana has been active in Colombia since 2005. Warke says a small family-run mining operation helped spark the company’s interest in the project.

“The La Bodega mine has been producing non-stop – it’s kept them going for something like a hundred years,” Warke estimates.

In total, the company has defined mineralization for 1,075 metres. The first 350 metres is the La Bodega zone, where the La Bodega artisanal mine is located. Another 200 metres is known as the La Rosa zone where the terrain quite hilly, so much so, that the company had to stop drilling the target because it needed a helicopter to move the drill around. That prompted Ventana to move further east to test the La Mascota zone (625 metres). The company has also identified the Las Mercedes zone about 400 metres south of La Bodega, where initial holes have been encouraging but more work is required.

The project is also adjacent to Greystar Resources (GSL-T) Angostura gold-silver project which has a measured and indicated resource of 330 million tonnes grading 1.09 grams gold per tonne and 6 grams silver totaling 11.5 million oz. of gold. The deposit also has an inferred resource of 90 million tonnes grading 1.19 grams gold per tonne and 6 grams silver totaling 3.5 million oz. gold.

Warke says Colombia has been cracking down on drug cartels, guerilla warfare and is in the process of rewriting its mining law. The country welcomes foreign mining companies and the area where La Bodega is – the California-Vetas gold mining district – is well-known for mining.

Warke says that in exploration, the odds are stacked against you.

“So it’s not easy when you are living by the end of a drill bit but in this instance it was the right environment, the right geological structure,” Warke says. “We’ve done a lot of quality control, we double check pretty well all the drill results coming out, we’ve had independents coming down to the site to verify that; we are very cognizant of making sure things are done properly.”

The company might reap the benefits of its luck by way of a partnership with a mid-tier or major gold miner. Warke says quite a few have already been down to look at the site.