Band-Ore making plans for two Timmins properties

A junior mining company that was all but dead for the past three years has sprung to life and is looking to explore promising ground in this northern Ontario city’s west end.

Band-Ore Resources (CDN) announced recently it has completed a series of deals giving it access to two properties that straddle the historic Porcupine-Destor Fault, the geologic formation that has hosted the majority of the operating gold mines in the Porcupine camp here.

The properties are in Bristol, Thornloe, Carscallen and Denton twps. Band-Ore spokesman Wayne O’Connor says that the properties have a lot of promise. “These (properties) are virgin areas to drilling and one of the last places along the Porcupine-Destor Fault still grossly underexplored,” he said. In a report on the area released in 1991 by resident geologist Lorne Luhta of Ontario’s Ministry of Northern Development and Mines, the area is described as having similar characteristics to the Hemlo gold field in northwestern Ontario and to the property that gave rise to the McIntyre mine in Schumacher. O’Connor, a Band-Ore director, has been meeting with a number of major mining companies in an effort to open negotiations

for a joint exploration program. He would not say what companies he has approached. (Two majors, Placer Dome and Hemlo Gold Mines, control adjacent properties.)

O’Connor says Band-Ore began the series of claim and patent acquisitions in March, 1991, at the time Luhta’s report was released.

The government report states that “many similarities exist between this core and rocks which host the McIntyre copper-gold-molybdenum deposit.” While doing his Masters thesis on this deposit, Luhta mapped three distinct alteration zoned assemblages within the ore-hosting Pearl Lake porphyry. Luhta observed similar alteration patterns to the McIntyre deposit at the Ross mine in Hislop Twp. and the old Jerome mine in Osway Twp. And he reported seeing rocks strikingly similar to the McIntyre deposit at the Williams gold mine at Hemlo while on a tour of the latter.