Gitennes gears up for Peruvian drilling program

Alberta-listed Gitennes Exploration (GIT-A) is set to begin drilling its Virgen gold property in the Huamachuco region of north-central Peru.

In preparation for at least 2,000 metres of drilling, the company has constructed a 20-man camp, completed 6.5 km of access road, and mobilized a rig to the site.

An ongoing program of geological mapping and sampling has further extended the highly prospective gold-bearing Rio Suro breccia zone to the north.

Previous results from rock chip sampling returned 20.6 metres grading 19.22 grams gold per tonne.

To the immediate northwest, 21 chip samples averaged 1.98 grams gold (including a 7.3-metre-long traverse grading 7.05 grams).

An isolated outcrop, 25 metres west of this area, returned 2.3 metres averaging 7.55 grams gold. A further 50 metres to the northwest, three separate, 10-metre-long channel sites were found to average 2.67, 2.65 and 0.64 grams gold.

The Rio Suro prospect is now mapped and sampled over a length of 500 metres and a width varying from 100 to 210 metres. It remains open to the north and west.

The zone is exposed across a vertical height of 85 metres in a hill at its southern end, and across a 120-metre height in a second hill at its northern extension. Grid-based soil sampling has identified an open-ended, 200-metre-long gold anomaly, with widths of up to 100 metres, extending to the northwest from Rio Suro. Twenty-four soil samples yielded an average grade of 3.83 grams gold, while two additional samples ran 17.88 and 29.85 grams.

President Gerry Blackwell says the unusually strong gold-in-soil anomaly “may be somewhat transported, but it is still reflecting the rock and not something supergene.” He adds that there may be some talus contamination from an above cliff area.

Rio Suro is a bulk-tonnage target. Early sampling results had suggested an average grade of 2.5 grams gold, but Gitennes has since encountered areas of higher grade along the eastern and northern portions of the zone.

Elsewhere on the 1,900-ha property, a new breccia zone has been discovered within a large soil anomaly, 1,200 metres east of Rio Suro. Preliminary sampling returned anomalous gold values ranging from 0.2 to 5.4 grams in seven of 12 chip samples.

In total, Gitennes has identified six breccia bodies following a series of north-south-trending faults.

The Virgen property is underlain by quartzites and a thick sedimentary unit of the Chimu Formation. This structure has been folded and faulted, and is intruded by younger, igneous granitic rocks.

The quartzite units and a good portion of the intrusives have been brecciated, serving as favorable hosts to epithermal gold mineralization.

Gitennes’ wholly owned Peruvian subsidiary can acquire the property by paying US$800,000 cash and spending US$1.5 million over four years.

Gitennes has 25.8 million shares outstanding on a fully diluted basis, with a working capital of $6.5 million.