Premier hoping to complete the picture on Mine Trend

SITE VISIT

Red Lake, Ont. — In gold mining, the address matters. And in Red Lake, it’s useful to be the next-door neighbour of the camp’s largest operation.

The good street is the Red Lake Mine Trend, the southeast-striking deformation zone that extends from McKenzie Island eastward through the Cochenour, Campbell and Dickenson orebodies. The next-door neighbour to Goldcorp (G-T, GG-N) is the Rahill-Bonanza joint venture, a 50/50 deal between Goldcorp and junior Premier Gold Mines (PG-T, PIRGF-O).

Premier, an outgrowth of Wolfden Resources — which was taken over in May by Australian zinc producer Zinifex (ZFEXF-O, ZFX-A) — holds the old gold interests of Wolfden, which were centred on the Red Lake camp. And of those, about 8 sq. km between Campbell on the east and Cochenour on the west is the keystone, covering 4 km of the Mine Trend.

And not coincidentally, those 4 km are among the least well explored on the trend, having been held, historically, by a succession of junior companies that for many years had no ability to drill deep — even supposing they had had the money to do it with.

So it is that from the Wilmar deposit, in the joint venture’s northwest corner, to the Campbell property boundary, there are six recorded drill holes along the strike of the Mine Trend. Red Lake is an established camp, but “established” doesn’t mean every potential target has already seen a drill.

Moreover, the parts of the property that have seen intense drilling are the Wilmar gold deposit and the Bonanza gold prospect. From 1967 to 1975, Wilmar produced about 184,000 tonnes of ore running about 10 grams gold per tonne, as part of the Cochenour mine, which drifted east to Wilmar. Bonanza has never been in production, other than panning in the early days, but has three mineralized zones, two of which go for 700 metres along strike.

Exploration this year concentrated on Wilmar, where four separate mineralized zones were either known during production, or defined in later exploration. The greater part of Wilmar’s ore came out of the East Breccia Zone, on a contact between mafic flows and breccia of the Balmer volcanic assemblage (the principal mafic volcanic host rocks in the nearby mines) and an ultramafic stock. The mineralization itself is in quartz-carbonate veins with native gold, tellurides, and sulphides.

In its footwall, the East Footwall Diorite Zone has seen little drilling and no underground exploration. In a 1983 paper for the Ontario Geological Survey, geologists David Rigg and Ebe Scherkus recommended the diorite zone as a “major target” for future exploration, and recorded a strike length of 500 metres and widths from 3 to 30 metres.

To the west, the Rahill Zone includes both disseminated sulphides with gold, and quartz-tourmaline veins. The West Granodiorite Zone, beyond the Rahill Zone, hosts quartz-tourmaline veins in a steeply dipping granodiorite dyke.

The first surface hole of Premier’s summer program tested at depth below the Wilmar East Breccia and came up with 1 metre grading 49 grams gold per tonne, with about 5 metres around that intersection carrying some lower-grade gold mineralization. Later holes — inhibited by soft ultramafic rocks, which make drilling difficult — also intersected high-grade mineralization, including a 5-metre intersection that ran 14.2 grams per tonne, 2 metres grading 18.1 grams per tonne, and 5.8 metres averaging 2.4 grams per tonne. Premier estimated that true widths were about 65% of the drilled core lengths.

On the West Granodiorite, Premier has cut intersections of 0.8 to 3.6 metres, representing true widths between 0.5 and 2.3 metres. Those have shown average gold grades of 12 to 30 grams, except for the wider intersections, which averaged near 3 grams per tonne.

The agreement between Goldcorp and Premier, made in May, obliged Premier to put the first $1 million into the project, then called on both partners to contribute $2 million each. After that, Goldcorp could take over operation of the project, but “they have indicated it is unlikely that they will,” says Matt Long, Premier’s project manager. Instead, Goldcorp is looking at its wholly owned Cochenour property to the north, which produced 1.2 million oz. in three periods of operation between the 1930s and 1990s.

Goldcorp’s own corporate plans in the Red Lake area put a high priority on drilling out resources on both Cochenour — which Goldcorp owns — and on the Rahill-Bonanza joint venture ground. Goldcorp budgeted $4.5 million for resource definition at Cochenour and $2 million for deep exploration and resource drilling on the joint venture — which, matched by Premier, would put $5 million altogether into the ground.

If Goldcorp were to dewater the Cochenour workings, that would also allow some access into Wilmar from Cochenour. Premier would fund a quarter of the dewatering costs in exchange for that access.

Gold Eagle

Recent results from Gold Eagle Mines (GEA-T, GEAFF-O) continue to show high grades over significant widths in the Bruce Channel mineralized zone, below Red Lake. The mineralized zone is about 1,100 metres in the vertical dimension, and about 645 by 450 metres in plan.

Holes drilled into the zone from the mainland south of the Cochenour townsite this summer routinely intersected multiple mineralized zones, usually 1 metre to 3 metres in core length. One hole, BC19-9, cut 18.7 metres grading 8.1 grams gold per tonne, while another, BC19-7, cut 15.4 metres that averaged 23.2 grams. A third, drilled farther south, intersected 11.9 grams gold per tonne over 9 metres.

A new discovery, the Finn Zone, lies about 450 metres southwest of the Bruce Channel mineralization, still in Balmer volcanic rocks. Five drill holes are complete on the zone, with assay results from three holes showing grades of 2 to 6 grams over core lengths of 0.5 to 2 metres, with one intersection of 4.8 metres running 8 grams gold per tonne.

As a regional exercise, the company has started a 2-hole program — only two holes, but 1,500 metres each — from north of McKenzie Island, drilling southeast to test the intersection of the Red Lake break with the northeast-striking Post Lake deformation zone — structurally, something similar to Wilmar. The intended target is about 500 metres northwest of the Western Discovery Zone.

In August, Gold Eagle approved a plan for underground exploration on the Bruce Channel zones, which will be done from a 1,460-metre shaft with exploration levels at 800, 1,100 and 1,400 metres. J.S. Redpath has the contract to plan the shaft and workings, and former Dynatec engineer William Shaver will be advising Gold Eagle as a consultant on the program. Drilling on the shaft pilot hole started in October.

Rubicon Minerals (RMX-T, RBY-X) and Golden Tag Resources (GOG-V, GTAGF-O) are finishing a drill program to the north on McKenzie Island, at the McCuaig property.

Southwest of Premier’s ground, Cypress Development (CYP-V, CYDVF-O) and Grandview Gold (GVX-T, GVGDF-O) both have land positions. Cypress has just started drilling on the Broulan Reef property, west of Bonanza and south of Gold Eagle, where it plans a 10,000-metre program of two mother drill holes with multiple wedges off each.

Cypress is targeting the unconformity between Bruce Channel sedimentary rocks and the mafic volcanics of the Balmer assemblage. Structural interpretations in the area suggest the Balmer rocks are between 900 and 2,000 metres deep — about the same depth as Gold Eagle’s mineralization. The two principal holes will be drilled from the eastern boundary of the property, one northwest, toward Gold Eagle, and the other south, roughly along the property line.

Grandview plans drilling on its Sanshaw-Bonanza property, south of Broulan and Wilmar, this winter. Old resource estimates on the Sanshaw target put the deposit at 270,000 tonnes grading 2.7 grams gold per tonne. Grandview is earning a 60% interest in the property from privately held EMCO Corp.