Olympus eyes gold-bearing skarn (April 08, 2002)

Vancouver — With the price of gold moving higher, the timing could not be better for Olympus Pacific Minerals (OYM-V) to start drilling a high-grade skarn target on its Phuoc Son property in central Vietnam.

An initial 4-hole program is testing the central portion of the Khe Rin prospect. Grab samples collected from a series of adits created by small-scale miners returned grades ranging from 0.86 to 391.3 grams gold per tonne. Mineralization is associated with pyroxene skarn rocks containing pyrhotite- chalcopyrite-molybdenite and finely disseminated native gold. Petrographic studies by Olympus Pacific suggest that the skarn zone was created by a nearby intrusion.

Surface mapping has traced the zone for more than 800 metres along strike, with widths ranging up to 300 metres. An ongoing soil geochemical survey has so far outlined an anomaly 3 km long.

Over the past year, Olympus Pacific drill-tested the Dak Sa shear zone in the southeastern portion of the project. The program tested the downdip extension of gold mineralization exposed within shallow, small-scale mine workings along the western limb of a northerly plunging anticline at Bai Dat, as well as the nearby Bai Go prospect.

The Bai Dat zone comprises gold, silver and base metal mineralization hosted by quartz veins and breccias in greenschist metamorphics. The westerly dipping quartz vein system appears to have been folded near the surface into a northerly plunging anticline. Veins are typically 1-4 metres thick, with breccias and quartz-carbonate veinlets locally extending into the wall rocks. Open-pit and underground artisan miners have worked the vein over a 300-metre strike length along the anticline axis. The high-grade shoot was cut by 18 of the 32 holes drilled, showing an average grade of 22.7 grams gold over 3.6 metres.

Moving 1 km to the north at Bai Go, mineralization is associated with multiple quartz veins that measure up to 44 metres in true thickness in the Dak Sa shear zone. To date, 32 of the 37 drill holes have cut the targeted quartz vein over an area measuring 300 by 250 metres.

Kin Rin lies 7 km northwest of the Bai Go zone and represents a different style of mineralization than the base-metal-rich gold mineralization cut during last year’s drill program.

Olympus Pacific holds a 57.2% stake in the project and is negotiating to increase this to 67.4%. The remaining 32.6% belongs to Ivanhoe Mines (IVN-T).