Brookbank turns golden for Ontex

VANCOUVER–It’s been slow going at the Brookbank gold project in Ontario, but patience is a virtue for Ontex Resources (ONT-T, OXRSF-O): the latest set of assay results from the site include some of the highest gold values to date.

Ontex is advancing an 8,000- metre drill program at Brookbank, part of the historic Beardmore- Geraldton gold camp, and all of the program’s first eight holes intersected significant mineralization. The hole targeted the main Brookbank zone.

Hole 1 returned the longest, strongest intercept: 21 metres grading 17.41 grams gold per tonne from 475 metres down-hole. The first hole of the program was designed to hit the zone 50 metres below an intercept from last year that returned 16 grams gold over 3 metres.

Hole 2 cut 16 metres of 10.62 grams gold from 504 metres; hole 3 cored 14.1 metres grading 8.18 grams gold from 512 metres. And hole 7 returned 9.56 grams gold over 9.4 metres, starting at 324 metres depth.

Mineralization at Brookbank generally occurs on an east-west-trending, steeply dipping, sheared and altered contact zone between mafic volcanic and intrusive rocks to the south and conglomerate rocks to the north. A 2006 estimate pegged resources at 1.6 million indicated tonnes grading 7.1 grams gold and 1.6 million inferred tonnes grading 6.2 grams gold for 695,000 oz. gold, using a 2-gram gold cutoff grade.

On news of the Brookbank results, Ontex’s share price fell a penny to close at 32. The company has a 52-week trading range of 16.5-92 and has 90 million shares issued.

Ontex is working to upgrade the current resource to indicated status from inferred while also trying to expand the deposit. The company sees the best potential for expansion within the strongly altered, 6- km strike length of heterogeneous brittle and ductile deformation and hydrothermal alteration between the Cherbourg zone to the west of the main deposit and the FoxEar zone to the east. The deformation zone stretches to widths up to 1 km and consists of bands of intense shearing, quartz veining, and fracturing.

In addition, Ontex has discovered several mineralized structures in the hangingwall volcanics to the south of the Brookbank deposit. In what looks like an analogous situation, three gold-mineralized veins have recently been discovered in the hangingwall rocks south of the Cherbourg zone. Ontex plans to follow up on these findings with diamond drilling.

The company plans to calculate a new resource estimate following completion of this year’s program.

Brookbank sits 175 km northeast of Thunder Bay and has seen considerable work stretching back more than 70 years. In 1934, Connell Mining and Exploration conducted a small exploration program; 10 years later, Noranda Exploration picked up where Connell left off with another limited program.

After almost 30 years of dormancy, Lynx Canada Exploration acquired the site and started drilling. In 1981, Metalore Resources (MET-T, MTLRF-O)optioned the property and began a significant exploration program that led to an option agreement with Hudson Bay and Minorco Canada in 1986. Despite considerable spending and promising results, Hudson Bay dropped the option a few years later, when Ontex initiated litigation against Metalore that proved difficult to resolve.

In 1989, Placer Dome signed onto the project and a year later produced the project’s first mineral resource estimate. Shortly after, however, Placer dropped its option, also because of the now-protracted litigation between Metalore and Ontex. That dispute precluded further work on the property until 1998, when the two parties finally came to an agreement. Ontex took over as operator and optioned all of Metalore’s property in the surrounding area.

The project sits in a historic gold district: the Beardmore-Geraldton and nearbyTashota-Onaman greenstone belts have produced over 4.1 million oz. gold from 14 past-producers since the 1930s. The belts host sulphide gold mineralization in quartz veins, iron formations, shear zones and porphyries.