EXPLORATION 1999 – Queenston assembles land packages

Best known for concentrating its efforts in the Kirkland Lake area, Queenston Mining (QMI-T) has recently made deals to advance exploration on properties in other parts of the Abitibi.

A joint venture with a private company, Electrum Stator Resource, will see Electrum earn a 50% interest in Queenston’s Pandora gold property, about 20 km northwest

of Malartic, Que., by funding $2 million in exploration before the end of 2001. Queenston also gets $200,000 in option payments during the life of the deal, and will operate the project.

Once Electrum has earned its interest, it can opt to increase its interest another 10% by spending $1 million on exploration by the end of 2002, and it can add another 10% by spending an additional $1 million by the end of 2003. Each additional option comes with a payment of $100,000 to Queenston.

The Pandora properties were developed from shafts in the 1930s, with some limited production. Drilling by other operators in the 1980s and 1990s has defined five gold zones, including two that were never investigated in the 1930s. Electrum’s first $500,000 in exploration expenditures will go toward a drilling program on extensions of three of the known zones, and on targets elsewhere on the property.

In Hanna and Reaume twps., north of Timmins, Ont., Queenston has acquired a 40-sq.-km block on the northern margin of a sequence of felsic volcanic rocks, on the contact with an ultramafic-to-mafic volcanic sequence. Despite favourable geology for base metal deposits, the area has been little-explored, owing to a deep overburden cover. Electromagnetic conductors are known to occur along the contact between the felsic sequence and the more mafic rocks to the north, and limited drilling in the 1960s and 1970s intersected some base metal mineralization.

Queenston has immediate plans for ground geophysics over the conductors discovered in airborne electromagnetic surveys, and may drill later in the year.