Under former Haywood VP, Mantle plugs away at Akie

Vancouver — Mantle Resources (MTS-V, MTSZF-O) is carving out a name for itself among junior explorers, with results from the most recent hole at the company’s Akie property, in northeastern B.C., showing some of the highest zinc, lead and silver grades encountered to date, and a $2-million brokered private placement giving it the capital it needs to move the project forward.

The Mantle story has been slowly developing over the last couple of years. Promising results from the 2006 drill campaign prompted Lundin Mining (LUN-T, LMC-N) to take a 10% interest in the company in late 2006. Through 2007, Mantle has closed a series of small financings and engineered a takeover of Ecstall Mining to consolidate its hold on the Kechika zinc-lead basin.

This past summer, the company spent $10 million exploring and drilling Akie. Results from three holes have since been released. Hole 45 returned 32 metres grading 15.35% zinc, 3.4% lead and 25.24 grams silver per tonne from 512 metres depth. Hole 42 intersected 11.3 metres grading 13.83% zinc, 3.24% lead and 21.11 grams silver from 667 metres, and hole 43 cut 27.6 metres grading 12.2% zinc, 2.99% lead and 20.01 grams silver from 544 metres.

Mantle also just announced a private placement of up to 1.25 million shares at $1.60 apiece for gross proceeds of up to $2 million, to continue to fund exploration.

Mineralization at Akie is sedimentary exhalative (SEDEX) zinc-lead-silver. The SEDEX deposit occurs at the base of a northwest-trending, steeply southwest-dipping, 500-metre-wide package of folded shales and siltstones referred to as the Gunsteel Formation, and consists of a sheet-like body of laminated, fine-grained, massive pyrite-sphalerite-galena-barite mineralization.

To date, Mantle has defined a 700-metre strike length, which is still open at both ends, and estimates true thickness at between 10 and 30 metres. The company had three drills on-site this year, and plans to double that next season.

In addition, the company recently applied to extend the Akie logging road. The 16-km road would follow a route previously designed by a local logging company and would provide surface access to the main Akie zone, called Cardiac Creek. Currently, all drilling is helicopter supported; since the company plans considerable drilling next year, a road would significantly reduce costs.

“This project needs a lot more drilling,” says Mantle president and CEO Jim Mustard. “Technically, there are challenges — thrust faults, drills that deviate at depth — but this is such an exciting project.”

Mustard is, in fact, another significant part of the Mantle story. He joined the company in mid-September after 11 years with Haywood Securities, many of those years spent as a vice-president and senior mining analyst. Motivation for the career change was both personal and professional.

“I’d been a mining analyst for a long time — I’d been all over the world, numerous times,” he says. “It was time for a change. And I just got excited about this opportunity. I looked at this district and saw a lot of unfinished business, and so a lot of possibility.”

Mustard believes that the Kechika Trough remains underexplored — not for geological reasons, but because corporate takeovers left key assets in the wrong hands, with declining metal prices taking the rest of the wind out of explorers’ sails. Now, he is head of a company that holds an extensive land package in the region: Mantle holds 840 sq. km outright and has another 182 sq. km under option, in total controlling 180 km of the Kechika Trough.

“I’m frightened by the amount of work there is to do here,” Mustard says. “It is my intent to have a dedicated budget and exploration team, not for Akie, but for the rest of the district. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be other similar deposits in the area.”