Minefinders announces start of drill program at Bolsa property

The new president of Minefinders (VSE) expects drilling will begin this September on La Bolsa, a gold property in Mexico’s Sonora state.

Mark Bailey, who is also a geologist, heads up a new management team that took control of Minefinders after a group of dissident shareholders launched a proxy battle seeking to remove previous management. The dissident shareholders had criticized the previous directors for, among other things, not carrying out drilling at La Bolsa.

A work program is under way, and results from a first-phase exploration program “confirm the presence of a gold-silver-mineralized system with geological potential to host a gold deposit in excess of 1 million oz.” Geological mapping and geochemical sampling have defined an area of anomalous gold-silver mineralization with a strike length exceeding 4,200 ft. and a width of 2,000 ft.

Minefinders has identified its primary drill target within this zone, which, contoured at a minimum of 0.1 gram gold per tonne, exceeds 2,200 ft. in strike length and is 200-700 ft. wide.

The mineralization is hosted in a complex sequence of brecciated and stockwork-veined, intermediate-to-felsic porphyries. Quartz-sericite alteration is intensely developed over the primary target zone.

More than 600 rock chip samples were taken on the property to date. Near the northern end of the primary target, 24 continuous chip samples taken across 500 ft. of exposed outcrop (perpendicular to the strike of the mineralized zone) averaged 0.032 oz. gold per ton.

Near the southern end, a 62-ft.-long trench was cut in mineralization averaging 0.014 oz. gold over a 500-ft. width. The highest-grade mineralization (0.2 to 0.48 oz.) on the primary drill target is associated with late-stage calcite breccia veins and intense quartz stockwork zones.

Several anomalies were identified outside of the main mineralized zone. Minefinders plans to test these targets, which have potential for Carlin-type sedimentary-hosted deposits, during the initial drill program.