Strongbow To Tally Nickel King Resource

In September, Strongbow Exploration (SBW-V, SBWFF-O) received assay results for the final 14 holes of its 2008 drill program at its Nickel King project in the Northwest Territories.

Over the last two years, Strongbow has drilled a little over 10,000 metres in the main zone of the nickel-copper-cobalt deposit and extended the strike length to about 2,600 metres.

“We’ve been quite struck by the increasing size,” Ken Armstrong, Strongbow’s president and chief executive, told The Northern Miner. “This is a very large, well-mineralized, nickel-copper- cobalt system.”

Now the Vancouver-based junior is hiring PEG Mining Consultants to complete an independent National Instrument (NI) 43-101 resource estimate for the deposit’s main zone.

Last year, after developing geological block models for the upper and lower sills in the main zone, PEG decided that drilling information from the zone was sufficient to upgrade the completed block model to an NI 43-101-compliant resource — expected to be complete by late February.

The 76.4-sq.-km Nickel King property is about 550 km southeast of Yellowknife and 145 km northeast of Stony Rapids, Sask.

The property is situated within the southern part of the Snowbird Tectonic zone that forms the boundary between the Archean Rae and Hearn geological provinces.

“The Snowbird Tectonic zone conceptually is a very good place to be looking for magmatic sulphide nickel deposits,” Armstrong says. “We’re trying to build a package of prospects and showings to show this area has the potential to become a new belt of nickel deposits within central Canada because it hasn’t really been looked at in detail before.”

One reason was the geography. But with the completion of a new road up to Stony Rapids in 1999, the job of getting to the area is a heck of a lot easier and less expensive, and has increased the level of logistical support available in town.

The Snowbird Tectonic zone (SBTZ), a major crustal scale structure, is prospective for magmatic sulphide nickel deposits.

Strongbow holds a 100% interest in about 3,200 sq. km of mineral claims, leases and permits along a 240-km strike length of the southern SBTZ. In addition to Nickel King, Strongbow has identified a number of priority targets — most of which are in Saskatchewan.

Highlights from the most recent drill hole results at Nickel King’s main zone included hole 08-39 in the lower sill, which returned 12.5 metres grading 1.07% nickel, 0.26% copper and 0.041% cobalt, and hole 60, which cut 9 metres grading 1.16% nickel, 0.24% copper and 0.051% cobalt.

Drilling at Nickel King has defined mineralized zones with stacked, south-dipping sills over a strike length of 2.6 km.

“The strike length is encouraging and combined with the work we’ve done outside of Nickel King and in particular on the claims we’ve picked up in Saskatchewan, we’ve been able to identify similar rocks, some of them carrying nickel sulphide minerals,” Armstrong explains.

Mineralization within both sills of the main zone at Nickel King is continuous along the strike length. The sills range from 40 to 110 metres in thickness and could make up two limbs of a westerly plunging synform.

The lower sill has been traced along a strike length of more than 1,900 metres and remains open to the southwest and southeast. Upper sill mineralization can now be traced along strike for more than 2,300 metres. Moreover, a thickening zone of significant mineralization can be traced for more than 1,050 metres starting near surface within the central main zone and plunging west and southwestward to a depth of 160 metres.

The main zone was first discovered in the 1950s by Inco. A historical resource (not compliant with NI 43-101 standards) was completed on an 800-metre strike length in the main zone in the late 1980s based on earlier drilling by Inco.

According to that data, the main zone resource is estimated at 15.04 million tons grading 0.45% nickel and 0.12% copper at a cutoff grade of 0.1% nickel, including 4.9 million tons grading 0.72% nickel and 0.19% copper at a 0.5% nickel cutoff.

The majority of the historical resource was located in lower sill, and Strongbow believes there are indications of significant grades in the upper sill.

Strongbow Explorations recently traded at about 7¢ per share and has a 52-week trading range of 2-52¢.