HudBay, Eureka prove up Lottie Lake VMS property

There’s nothing terribly subtle about the mineral indicator chemistry on Eureka Resources‘ (EUK-C) Lottie Lake property, 25 km northwest of Wells in British Columbia’s Cariboo mining district. Two years ago, prospecting on the company’s Lottie claim revealed a single boulder of volcanogenic massive sulphide (VMS) mineralization assaying 24% copper, while several others assayed 1-7% copper and as much as 1% zinc, plus up to 5 grams gold and 66 grams silver per tonne.

That was enough to attract Hudson Bay Exploration & Development, which now has the right to earn a 60% interest in the Lottie Lake properties for $375,000 in option payments, plus staged exploration expenditures of $5.5 million to be made on or before Jan. 1, 2005.

Commitments such as this are few and far between in British Columbia’s beleaguered exploration sector, which has been frustrated by native land claims and the willingness of the provincial government to convert vast tracts of land into parks.

Since taking on the property, HudBay has moved quickly to exploit its potential, committing to spend least $400,000 on exploration this year alone. Work to date has included geological mapping and prospecting, coupled with a combination of geochemical and geophysical approaches.

The planned initial surveys on the 26,000-ha property were completed by the end of August, and HudBay plans to do follow-up work on anomalies detected by these programs, as well as anomalies previously found by Eureka. In addition, the company intends to cut 120 km of grid lines to allow ground electromagnetic (EM) refinement of potential targets for drilling.

The work has already confirmed the occurrence of high-grade copper float and gossan discovered by Eureka near Lottie Lake in 1999. To date, the extensive glacial till and colluvium have impeded the company’s ability to locate the bedrock source of the high-grade material. Nevertheless, HudBay, owing to its technical capability, has made significant progress already.

HudBay used its Spectrem airborne EM (fixed-wing) exploration system to fly over a portion of the property earlier this year. This led to the identification of several EM conductors, prompting the joint venture to stake an additional 68 claim units. The rest of the property has more rugged topography and so requires the use of a helicopter-based EM system.

A primary target is a 900-metre, open-ended, ground EM anomaly. The anomaly is close to the M7 trench, which contains numerous boulders assaying up to 24% copper. The work completed in 1999 defined this anomaly as a plausible source of these mineralized boulders, says Eureka. The Lottie claim is underlain by the Antler assemblage of intermediate-to-basic volcanic rocks. This group of rocks has been the subject of intermittent exploration for VMS deposits since the mid 1970s. The angularity, frequency and distribution of the heavily mineralized boulders found to date are “indicative that glacial transport is quite limited” and that the source rocks for these boulders are not far away, the company reports.