Sackville, N.B. —
Prospecting work uncovered visible gold and bonanza-grade values in several grab samples taken from a new target area, some 3 km northwest of the Central zone, the site of an aggressive drilling program by Freewest earlier this year. Twenty-seven grab samples collected from boulders, float and sub-cropping material along a 1.9-km distance returned gold values ranging from 0.05 to 418 grams per tonne. Twenty of these samples carried values greater than 1 gram gold per tonne, including bonanza grades of 21.3 grams, 50.4 grams, 54.5 grams and 418 grams.
The samples were taken from angular blocks of sericitized metasediments containing quartz veins and stockwork, with strongly disseminated pyrite, stibnite and arsenopyrite. The trail of boulders and sub-crop material was discovered within the confines of a large northwest-striking till anomaly characterized by highly anomalous levels of gold, bismuth, antimony, arsenic, tungsten and molybdenum.
“When you can find high-grade float that’s running 12 oz. [418 grams], it’s always a good sign,” says company spokesman Mackenzie Watson, adding that the float certainly hasn’t traveled far from the source.
Anomaly A, which measures 4 by 1 km, is one of several anomalies defined by last year’s property-wide sampling program in which a soil or till sample was collected every 400 sq. metres.
Line cutters were sent in this summer to extend the grid so that follow-up exploration work could be carried out. This work included prospecting, geological mapping and further soil sampling, plus an induced-polarization (IP) and magnetic geophysical survey. Sampling of the B-horizon was done at a 25-metre spacing along the 100-metre grid lines. This defined persistent anomalous values in Anomaly A over a distance of 2.5 km and widths of up to 500 metres. Soils have yielded highly elevated values of up to 432 parts per billion (ppb) gold, 101 parts per million (ppm) antimony, 925 ppm arsenic and 10 ppm bismuth.
A second anomalous area, dubbed Anomaly B, lies a couple of kilometres south of Anomaly A and 2.3 km due west of the Central zone. This anomaly measures 500 by 200 metres and contains maximum values of up to 1.5 grams gold, 67.8 ppm antimony and 182 ppm arsenic. Further prospecting and soil sampling have been carried out on both anomalies. Freewest has begun excavator stripping on the two anomalies to try to source the boulders and prepare for diamond drilling early in 2002.
The Clarence Stream property lies 70 km southwest of Fredericton, the provincial capital, and some 25 km northwest of St. George, in an area of the province best known for tungsten and tin mineralization. The property is readily accessible by a network of provincial roads from all points in southwestern New Brunswick. Highway 770 crosses the property, as does a major power line servicing the past-producing Mount Pleasant tungsten-molybdenum mine and the neighbouring village of Rollingdam.
The Clarence Stream claim group lies along the northern margin of the St. George batholith, a large 2,000-sq.-km multi-phase granitic intrusion that developed at the junction of the Avalon and St. Croix terranes. The batholith intrudes rocks ranging in age from Late Precambrian to Early Devonian and preceded movement along both the northeast- and northwest-striking faults that were active at the end of the Acadian Orogeny.
Geological maps show the property area to be underlain by the Kendall Mountain Formation, which is part of the Ordovician-age Cookson Group, consisting of the Calais Formation (grey shale, siltstone, mafic volcanics) and Woodland Formation (feldspatic wacke, shale). The Kendall Mountain Formation consists of quartz arenite and interbedded black carbonaceous argillite and minor conglomerate.
This package of rocks lies northwest of Silurian-to-Early-Devonian siliclastic and volcaniclastic sedimentary and volcanic strata of the Mascarene Group. Consulting geologist Glenn Lutes notes that there is little outcropping rock between Rollingdam and the Magaguadavic River, and hence there is uncertainty with respect to the location of formations, boundaries and structural zones that strike through the Clarence Stream property. Shallow glacial tills cover much of the area.
Freewest has discovered several gold occurrences in a northeast-striking belt of metasediments and metagabbros within the contact aureole of the St. George batholith. Rock types include variably silicified, hornsfelsic metasediments, plus biotite, calc-silicate, amphibole-rich hornfels and metagabbros.
Freewest originally optioned the Clarence Stream property from local prospector Reginald Cox in May 1999 for $200,000 cash and 100,000 shares, to be spread over four years. Freewest has since tied up a lot more land in the Clarence Stream area, to hold a total of 97 sq. km.
Cox had discovered gold-bearing boulders in 1998 while prospecting along newly built forestry roads, with the aid of data derived from a 1992 regional stream-sediment geochemical survey by the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC).
Provincial government mineral studies also served as a guide. The GSC survey revealed a prominent cluster of gold-in-stream-sediment anomalies close to the property, with gold values of up to 341 ppb. Grabs from the boulders assayed as high as 45.6 grams and carried arsenic and antimony.
When representatives of Freewest first scoured the property as part of their due diligence, they collected 23 grab samples from float and subcropping material along a 1-km trend. These samples carried gold values ranging from 0.09 to 76.8 grams, for an average of 13 grams.
Outcrop found
With little exposed outcrop to speak of, Project Manager George Murphy managed to find one small outcrop of gabbro in the area of the Central zone, where a narrow shear ran 2 grams gold per tonne.
In 1999 and 2000, Freewest completed a program of prospecting, trenching, geological mapping, linecutting and soil geochemistry, as well as grid geophysics comprising a magnetometer survey and a dipole-to-dipole IP survey. This work outlined five zones of intrusion-related gold mineralization that had been intermittently traced by trenching over a collective strike length of 2 km. The mineralization is hosted in brittle-to-ductile shear zones, healed by quartz veins, and in biotite-cordierite hornfels and skarn. The quartz-vein mineralization strikes northeast-southwest, roughly parallel to the northwest contact of the St. George batholith.
The five zones — West, Cox, N, Central and East — may be part of the same mineralized structure, which is related to a major fault known as the Sawyer Brook fault. This fault cuts through the property over a strike length of more than 8 km.
More than 1,500 soil samples were initially taken over the discovery area. The results showed two well-defined anomalies: a western anomaly adjacent to the Cox, West, Central and N zones is 500 metres wide and extends for 900 metres along a southeast trend; a second anomaly coincides with the East zone mineralization, a further 700 metres to the east.
Freewest ended a first round of shallow drilling in April after completing 3,474 metres in 39 holes on the five zones. Most of the holes intersected encouraging, albeit narrow, intervals of gold mineralization. The potential of the area was best-illustrated by drilling on the Central zone, which yielded 15.06 grams across 21 metres at a vertical depth of 60 metres below surface in hole 39. The intercept included higher-grade sections of 18.7 grams over 1 metre, 25.9 grams over 5 metres and 41.2 grams over 3.5 metres.
Hole 39 had undercut hole 37, which pulled 27.5 metres grading 3.5 grams, including 14.5 metres of 5.3 grams, at 30 metres of depth. Both holes encountered strong quartz veining and stockwork hosted in highly siliceou
s and sericitically altered quartzwacke and hornfel.
Freewest resumed drilling at Clarence Stream in early June and completed an additional 25 holes, of which 18 targeted the Central zone on 25-metre centres. In all, 22 drill holes tested the Central zone over a strike length of close to 125 metres and to a vertical depth of 180 metres. The weighted average grade of the 22 drill intercepts is 7.31 grams over an average core length of 8.3 metres. The intersected widths are close to true widths.
Sheared contact
Gold mineralization in the Central zone prospect is in a series of quartz veins and stockwock, hosted in a sheared contact between predominantly gabbro sills and metasedimentary rocks. The mineralization consists of appreciable to abundant stibnite, native antimony, arsenopyrite, pyrrhotite, pyrite and sphalerite, with lesser amounts of scheelite, bismuthinite and locally, fine-grained gold. Most of the visible gold is half a millimetre or less.
The metasediments comprise a mix of thinly bedded argillite soapstone, which was metamorphosed to muscovite-biotite-cordierite grade, and some felsic tuffs. Most of the sequence is bedded. The package has been overturned and dips to the north at 65.
Freewest notes that the gold-antimony-arsenic-bismuth association at Clarence Stream is a signature of intrusion-related gold deposits worldwide, including the Tintina gold belt in Alaska and Yukon and, in particular, the Pogo deposit.
Donald Hoy, vice-president of exploration, says the recent discovery of high-grade boulders in Anomaly A, 3 km northwest of the Central zone, indicates there is a zoning peripheral to the intrusions. “We’re not seeing as much tungsten,” he says. “It’s more of a gold-arsenic-antimony association, so it may be more of a distal-type style of mineralization related to the batholiths.
“The new target is outside of that high-strain deformation corridor where things are pinching and swelling,” says Hoy, adding that the mineralization should be a lot more coherent once stripping begins. “I think that augurs much better for size potential.”
The new soil anomalies also appear to be spatially related to northwest-striking structural breaks. “Wherever we see these breaks, we’re getting some good anomalies, but it’s going to take some trenching to find out what the effect of these breaks are,” says Hoy.
“We don’t know what the smoking gun is yet; there are lots of intrusions kicking around, including the St. George batholith and a number of younger higher-level intrusions [Sorel Ridge and Pleasant Ridge granites]. There are some good reactive host rocks and there is a lot of structure, so it’s looking like the mineralization is going to be widespread.”
The next phase of drilling will test some of these new targets, and the company will also carry out further work on the known zones, which have only seen limited, shallow drilling. Freewest has retained Dundee Securities to act as an agent for the private placement of up to 1.7 million flow-through shares priced at 30 each, for proceeds of $500,000.
Mount Pleasant
There is no record of any previous exploration for gold in the Clarence Stream area. Tin was first discovered in the area in 1937 on Kedron Brook, 2 km north of the property. Early exploration efforts through the 1950s and 1960s focused on the Mount Pleasant area, 10 km northeast of the property. Large, porphyry-type tungsten-molybdenum deposits in the North and Fire Tower zones were explored in the 1970s. Billiton spent more than $120 million constructing the Mount Pleasant mine, and brought the Fire Tower zone into production in 1983. The operation was short-lived: hindered by metallurgical recovery problems, it closed in 1985 as a result of low tungsten prices.
Malcolm McLeod, a provincial government geologist, identified gold mineralization in a quartz vein system next to a particular phase of granite while mapping the northwest boundary of the St. George batholith during a mineral development project. The 1990 study predicted this particular granite-granodiorite assemblage would be fertile for gold.
Several isolated gold occurrences can be traced over a 15-km distance, extending from Three Bridges Brook southwest through South Oromocto Lake to Cundy Lake.
Interest spreads
A number of junior companies and individuals have picked up ground in the immediate area of Freewest, including
Earlier this summer, Freewest entered into an option agreement for the 46-claim Oromocto South property, held by Fancamp and situated 17 km east of Clarence Stream. Freewest can earn a half-interest by spending $200,000 over two years. Prospecting by Fancamp had uncovered grab samples that returned up to 2.6 grams gold.
Fancamp holds a total of 290 claims in the district covering 24 km strike of favourable contact horizons along the St. George batholith. Several of the properties are held in separate joint ventures with Murgor and Golden Hope.
Union Gold has carried out soil sampling, prospecting and a grid IP survey over its 34-sq.-km Rollingdam property, 4 km west of Clarence Stream. Several anomalous areas were defined by till samples, which yielded gold concentrations 5 to 45 times background values. Prospecting uncovered a few isolated boulders containing quartz-carbonate stockwork. The best grab returned 16.3 grams gold, 8,250 ppm antimony, 1,835 ppm zinc and greater than 10,000 ppm arsenic. Union Gold could be ready to begin drilling in January.
Rubicon picked up its 64-claim land position adjacent to Freewest in March 2000, prior to the ensuing staking rush. During a 4-day property examination last year, Rubicon took grab samples from boulders that carried values of up to 15.1% zinc, 0.69% arsenic and to 0.15 grams gold per tonne. Rubicon is looking for a joint-venture partner to advance the project.
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