Snowfield teams with De Beers at Mud Lake

Snowfield Development (SNO-V) has entered into an agreement with De Beers Canada Exploration concerning the processing of a 500-tonne bulk sample, which Snowfield is taking from its Mud Lake kimberlite, 60 km southeast of Yellowknife.

De Beers will cover the cost of the processing of the sample at their Grand Prairie, Alberta dense media separation facility.

Snowfield will cover the cost of extraction of the kimberlite and transportation to the processing facility.

The offer to process the sample does not come with any cost to Snowfield, or any obligation regarding future diamond production.

Gennen McDowall, a director of Snowfield’s, estimated that the processing of a sample of this size would normally have a price tag of between $750,000-$1 million.

Since September, Snowfield has drilled 17 holes into the Mud Lake kimberlite on claims, which form part of its Ticho project. The company is delineating the kimberlite, in an effort to choose the optimum place to take a bulk sample.

The kimberlite has been intersected directly below lake-sediment in several holes. Hole Mud-15 cut 3 metres of kimberlite at 16.8 metres vertical depth and hole SNOW: 9, drilled about 150 metres to the northwest of previous Phase I drilling, cut 3.5 metres of kimberlite at 13.7 metres depth.

The kimberlite under Mud Lake is flat-lying.

Kimberlite has been cut over a lateral distance of 450 metres.

In early March the company chose two areas for bulk sampling based on their accessibility. One area is adjacent to a granite scarp, while the other is under Mud Lake.

Four additional high priority geochemical and geophysical targets lie between 750 metres and 1.5 km northeast of Mud Lake. These will be drilled following the delineation drilling.

Snowfield entered into an agreement to option its 4.1-sq.-km Gten 16 mineral claim, which forms part of the Ticho project to Consolidated Goldwin Ventures (CGW-V) at the end of March. The property is about 15 km northwest of Mud Lake.

The claim hosts at least three high priority airborne geophysical targets.

Consolidated Goldwin can earn a 49% interest in the property subject to payment of $50,000, the issuance of 600,000 shares and exploration expenditures of $175,000. The plan is to perform ground geophysical surveys and then drill the anomalies.

The Ticho property is near Drybones Bay, Great Slave Lake. The bay is underlain by a large diamondiferous kimberlite discovered by David Smith of Yellowknife in 1994.