Endurance Gold advances on Pardo

Vancouver — Having recently closed about $2 million in financings, Endurance Gold (EDG-V) has kicked off this year’s exploration effort by mobilizing a geophysical crew to its Pardo project, located 65 km northeast of Sudbury, Ont.

Pardo covers an assemblage of the Proterozoic-aged Mississagi Formation, a basal unit of Huronian Supergroup sediments that unconformably overlie Archean basement rocks and forms the large Cobalt Embayment.

Endurance is targeting a basal conglomerate in the sedimentary sequence that hosts widespread, low-grade gold mineralization. Local higher-grade sections of mineralization are associated with the more pyritized zones of the conglomerate matrix.

Exploration in 2006 turned up three strong induced-polarization (IP) chargeability anomalies that were subsequently stripped to expose bedrock. Trench sampling of the basal conglomerate unit returned significant intervals of up to 13 metres grading 3.52 grams gold per tonne, including a 1-metre section of 15.3 grams gold. A composite average grade of 1.5 grams gold was returned from 421-metre channel samples over the exposure.

Demonstrating the potential for ore-grade gold over minable widths, Endurance is looking to broaden its exploration program, having only evaluated about 1% of its 24-sq.-km land package.

Past drilling confirms the conglomerate has a thickness of at least 125 metres, is flat-lying and near surface within the project area. Mineralization has been identified over a 5-km north-south strike length.

Endurance believes the project is analogous to South Africa’s prolific Witwatersrand basin, which has produced well over 1 billion oz. gold since the late 1800s.

Upcoming exploration will include drill testing of areas where strong surface mineralization has been identified.

The company also has exploration plans for its Turner project, located about 40 km northwest of Pardo. The geology at Turner is similar to Pardo with a pyritic conglomerate unit that carries both gold and uranium mineralization. Past exploration has returned surface samples running 0.27% U3O8 and a 3-metre drill interval of 0.06% U3O8.

An airborne geophysical survey is also under way on the company’s BQ polymetallic property, located 50 km northwest of Smithers, in northwestern B.C.

Endurance’s recent financings consisted of a brokered portion of more than 2 million non-flow-through units at 23 per unit and 4.3 million flow-through shares at 23 apiece, and a non-brokered portion of nearly 2.3 million non-flow-through units at 23 each. Units are comprised of a common share plus a transferable warrant exercisable at 40 for 18 months.

Shares of the junior recently traded in the 24-range giving it a $6.5-million market capitalization based on 27 million shares outstanding. The stock has a 52-trading range of 14-35.