SKN eyes more ground near Boka (August 25, 2003)

Vancouver — SKN Resources (SRL-V) has added 24.6 km to its already-impressive land holdings around Southwestern Resources‘ (SWG-T) Boka gold project in China’s Yunnan province.

Dubbed Tuobuka, the new project is 2 km south of the Boka 7 zone and jointly held with Kunming Gold Exploration Engineering, a subsidiary of a Chinese national organization.

Mineralization is hosted in Middle Proterozoic carbonaceous shales and calcareous siltstones in a strata-bound thrust zone of ductile-brittle shearing. Previous work identified a north-south-striking zone, which yielded surface values of 3.6 grams gold per tonne over 13 metres and 48.4 grams gold over 0.8 metre.

The new partners aim to complete a regional soil survey in preparation for drilling.

Under the deal, SKN can earn an 80% stake by making undisclosed cash payments over three years.

Last month, the junior picked up four exploration permit applications covering 380 sq. km west of the Boka gold project. The application area, known as the Huidong project, adjoins SKN’s Dongchuan project.

Late last year, Southwestern sparked interest in the area following the release of widespread gold values from Boka. The company picked up the Yunnan province property in September 2002 following a 2-month program of stream sediment-sampling and chip sampling over an 800-sq.-km area. The stream sediment geochemical data outlined a 15-km anomaly within the drainage containing the Boka 1 through 7 gold zones, which host a stratabound mineralized horizon that attracted artisan miners in 2001. The small-scale miners have dug more than 130 tunnels into the mountainside, and subsequent exploration by Southwestern led to the discovery of four more gold zones in the Boka project area, all of which occur within a 25-km-long structural zone and are confined to a specific stratigraphic horizon.

The most promising area is the Boka 1 zone, which consists of two sets of tunnels, dubbed North and South, that have been excavated along a gold zone extending for 1.4 km along strike and exposed vertically for 150 metres along a west-facing slope. Tunneling, which varies from 20 to 200 metres in length and crosscuts the general trend of mineralization, shows that the gold mineralization continues downdip for at least 200 metres and is open in all directions. Southwestern’s initial task was to sample the tunnels, and in early December 2002, the project caught the eye of the investment community when the junior reported values of up to 75.2 grams gold per tonne over 34.5 metres.

Four drill rigs are currently testing the Boka property.