The junior has entered into a memorandum of understanding with privately held Platinum Fox on 54 claims, or 1,000 acres, in the Chrome Mountain area and has acquired an additional 2,500 acres by staking 155 claims along a 7-mile strike length of what appears to be a favourable package of rocks.
The combined property covers the upper members of the Ultramafic series, composed of cumulates of olivine and bronzite, as well as the contact between the Ultramafic series and the Banded series.
The Banded series consists of several stratigraphic subdivisions of plagioclase-bearing cumulates and hosts several layers bearing platinum group elements (PGEs), including the JM Reef, an ore-bearing horizon that is being mined by
Idaho’s property is southwest of, and parallel to, the JM Reef, which dips steeply to the northeast. The property is within 1,500 ft. of the Frog Pond adit, which was used by Stillwater to explore the western portion of the JM Reef in the East Boulder area, 19 miles northwest of the Stillwater mine. Stillwater is spending US$270 million to develop the East Boulder project.
Based on a review of previous geological work, Idaho says the immediate area has some structural complexities consisting of transverse faults perpendicular to the strike of the JM Reef, with lateral offsets of up to 2,000 ft.
Idaho plans to undertake an extensive structural mapping and sampling program this summer in order to seek out potential offsets of the JM Reef. Limited grab sampling in the fall of 1998 returned anomalous values of up to 264 parts per billion combined platinum and palladium.
Idaho has also staked a further 119 claims covering 2,200 acres along a 12-mile strike length northeast of, and parallel to, the JM Reef. The Picket Pin property covers stratigraphic subdivisions between the Middle Banded series and Upper Banded series. The stratigraphic package occurs 2.6 km higher than the JM Reef.
The Picket Pin zone shows anomalous enrichment in disseminated PGE-bearing sulphides, which are hosted in anorthosite and overlain by troctolite and anorthosite of the olivine-bearing V zone. Early sampling in the Picket Pin Creek area yielded 0.58% copper, 0.21% nickel, 2.3 parts per million (ppm) platinum, 2.3 ppm palladium and 0.2 ppm gold. These values are said to be typical of the Pocket Pin stratigraphic zone.
Anaconda Minerals explored the area between 1979 and 1981, completing two deep diamond drill holes and 30 shallow drill holes along 9 miles of strike length.
A significant feature of the Picket Pin stratigraphic package is the reported presence of pods or pipe-like bodies of PGE-bearing sulphide mineralization. These occur 150 metres below the interval of stratabound mineralization in the coarse-grained anorthosite. Idaho plans to carry out a summer field program of mapping and sampling to investigate these pipe-like features.
The company has US$100,000 in its treasury, along with 10 million shares outstanding, or 25 million on a fully diluted basis.
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