Pacific Rim cuts high-grade at El Dorado (August 02, 2002)

Vancouver — Pacific Rim Mining (PMU-V) has cut high-grade gold at its El Dorado gold project located in El Salvador.

The company reports that it has received assay results for the bottom 70 metres of hole P02-204, as well as all of the assays for holes P02-205 and 206. Results are still pending for an additional four holes.

Hole P02-204 cut 0.25 metres averaging 26.78 grams gold and 183 grams silver per tonne, starting 341.6 metres down-hole. This was followed by a 0.55-metre section that averaged 9.39 grams gold and 57 grams silver starting 345.65 metres down-hole. Pacific Rim states that these narrow, high-grade veins do not correlate with any known veins at the surface. As a result their orientation and true width are as of yet undetermined.

Drill hole P02-205 was designed to pass through the El Dorado vein at an elevation of 200 metres and the Minita vein at an elevation of 100 metres. Assays from the El Dorado vein were below the 6 grams gold per tonne cutoff, however, the Minita vein intersection returned 9.33 grams gold and 56 grams silver over a true width of 9.75 metres. This intercept cuts the Minita vein system about 60 metres below and to the north of previous drilling outside of the current Minita resource area.

Drill hole P02-206 was designed to test the southern Moreno, the southern Minita and the El Dorado veins. The southern Minita vein averaged 55.49 grams gold per tonne and 159 grams silver over a true width of 1.1 metres. The intersection is situated about 295 metres above sea level and roughly 50 metres south of the Minita resource area.

Pacific Rim states that follow-up drilling in this area is warranted and will commence in the coming months.

“We are very pleased with the results of the El Dorado drill program to date," said Tom Shrake, CEO of Pacific Rim. "High-grade gold mineralization has been identified both north and south of the existing resource which may eventually result in an expansion of this resource as well as on other veins in the vicinity. There are many high-quality targets that remain to be drill tested both in the center of the project area where our Phase 1 drilling is concentrating, and elsewhere on this large property.”

As drilling continues the company is developing additional drill targets through mapping and trenching. Two samples in the Minita 3 vein to the north of the Minita resource yielded 15.38 grams gold and 13.63 grams gold over a width of 0.1 metre. In addition, the southern extension of the Nueva Esperanza vein was sampled 150 metres south of where previous shallow drilling tested this vein. Two separate samples were taken across the vein and averaged 21.03 and 12.26 grams gold over widths of 0.95 and 0.6 metres, respectively.

The El Dorado District is an adularia-sericite type epithermal gold system located in El Salvador that hosts bonanza gold. In excess of 35 known quartz veins have been identified and these veins have a total strike length of over 18 km. Previous drilling determined that the highest grade gold was encountered in a “Productive Interval” that occurs in the elevation range of approximately 100-to-250 meters above sea level. To date only two veins have been systematically drill-tested in the productive interval.

The Minita vein system was mined in the mid-1900’s and currently hosts an indicated source of 799,200 tonnes with an average grade of 13.7 grams gold per tonne and 97.9 grams silver per tonne below the old stopes.