Tinka keeps climbing on Peruvian zinc discovery

VANCOUVER – Tinka Resources‘ (TK-V) share price chart is the mirror image of many a junior explorer. In the last six months, the Toronto Venture Exchange has lost 20%. In that same time, Tinka has gained 55%. Year over year, the Vancouver-based explorer is up 125%.

Tinka is being rewarded for its two-pronged success at the Colquipucro project in Peru. Colquipucro is a 9,800-hectare land package in central Peru that has been mined for its high-grade silver veins since the 1800s. When the last of a series of owners abandoned the site in 2005, Tinka staked the historic ground.

For the first few years, Tinka did what its predecessors had done: searched for silver, and successfully. In 2007, the company published an initial resource that estimated fractures within the sandstones at Colquipucro’s Zone I contained 20 million inferred ounces of silver, at an average grade of 111.4 grams silver per tonne.

Tinka’s drills at Colquipucro revealed a sedimentary unit underneath the sandstones that carried base metal mineralization. Intrigued, Tinka flew a series of induced polarization (IP) surveys extending south from Zone I towards an area known as Ayawilca, where silver mineralization was evident on surface. The IP results showed a distinct set of long, east-west trending fault structures, which correlated with soil geochemical anomalies showing elevated silver, zinc, and lead.

In 2011, after a few quiet years, Tinka returned to Ayawilca to test the anomalies. The initial drill program, designed to test for a near-surface, bulk-tonnage silver resource, was unsuccessful. Then Tinka decided to drill a deep hole into a clear IP target just to the east.

As soon as it passed through the upper layer of sandstones, the drill encountered massive and semi-massive sulphides within the sedimentary package. Assays returned multi-percent zinc values. Suddenly, Tinka had a new target: zinc.

In early 2012 the company conducted another IP survey, which successfully tracked the east-west anomalies for 1.2 km. Soon after, Tinka punched three more deep holes into Ayawilca, this time probing the westernmost IP target. All three holes intercepted massive and semi-massive sulphides that produced such results as 2 metres of 5.27% zinc and 11.1 grams silver, 6 metres of 2.77% zinc and 7.9 grams silver, and 4 metres of 4.7% zinc and 16.1 grams silver.

After a winter break, drilling resumed at Ayawilca in September. In November the fourth hole of 2012 returned 20 metres of 7.1% zinc, including 14 metres of 9.6% zinc. By January, Tinka was ready to release results from another few holes, including a 70-metre intercept in hole 12-08 that graded 4.8% zinc.

At that point, 10 of the 12 holes drilled into Ayawilca had hit into sulphide mineralization.

More recent news from Ayawilca contains more of the same. The first drill hole of 2013, hole 13-01, returned three mineralized intercepts: 6 metres of 3.26% zinc, 12 metres of 5.84% zinc, and 6 metres of 1.62% zinc. Hole 13-01 was drilled 200 metres east of the 70-metre intercept in hole 12-08 and 640 metres east of the Ayawilca discovery hole.

Most recently, hole 13-02 was drilled from the same site as hole 12-08 but to the south, to test for southern extensions of the healthy mineralization encountered in that hole. The effort produced another home run: hole 13-02 returned seven mineralized intercepts between 235 and 328 metres depth, including 16 metres of 3.36% zinc, 16 metres of 3.58% zinc, 16 metres of 4.62% zinc, and 10 metres of 3.23% zinc.

Tinka says it does not yet fully understand the geometry of and controls to mineralization at Ayawilca. The company believes that a series of intersecting fault structures at depth acted as source conduits. Regardless of how it got there, the sedimentary rocks at Colquipucro certainly seem to contain a healthy dose of zinc.

IP data traces the main chargeability anomalies at Ayawilca over 1,200 metres east-west and 800 metres north-south. However, the signal gains strength toward the east and the anomalies remain open in this direction, so Tinka is now completing another 8 km of line surveying at Ayawilca over favourable geology extending to the east.

While working at Ayawilca, Tinka has also continued to expand and better define its silver resource at Zone I, which is just 1.5 km to the north. In October the company updated the Zone I resource estimate; the area is now home to 13.9 million inferred tonnes grading 72.98 grams silver, for 32.7 million contained oz.

This year Tinka aims to complete enough infill drilling at Zone I to upgrade much of the inferred resource to indicated status. In late March, the company announced results from the first few holes of that infill effort, which included such intercepts at 18.7 metres grading 165.2 grams silver, 12 metres of 19.5 grams silver, and 52 metres of 41.4 grams silver.

At the end of 2012 Tinka had $2.8 million in cash, which it deemed as sufficient to funds its Colquipucro exploration programs during 2013.

In August 2012, Tinka shares were worth roughly 45¢. Today those shares are trading at $1.11, down slightly from a recent 52-week high of $1.25. Tinka has 75 million shares outstanding, 84 million fully diluted.