Ventana Extends La Mascota To 725 Metres, Raises $6M

When the first set of drill results from Ventana Gold’s (VEN-T) La Bodega gold project in Colombia came in, CEO Richard Warke says no one could believe it.

“We knew there was potential for interesting drill results but we didn’t expect the first hole would be 106 metres of 7.8 grams — from that point on we felt that we’ve got something here that’s special,” Warke says from his Vancouver office.

That was in 2006, but things haven’t changed much. Ventana has just brought in a third drill to its La Bodega project to test the strike and down-dip extension with a 3,400- metre drill program, as it goes over the final assays coming in from its initial 25,000-metre program completed at the end of 2008.

The company has now extended the strike length of the La Mascota zone to 725 metres.

Drilling highlights from the final batch of assays include hole 100, which returned 57.4 metres grading 8.66 grams gold per tonne, drilled to 256.4 metres depth. A four-metre interval in the hole to 49 metres depth returned 64.85 grams gold.

Ventana also just raised $6 million in a non-brokered private placement that will see Lumina Capital up its stake in the company to 8.5%, or 12.2% fully diluted.

Lumina will receive 4.3 million units at $1.40 per unit. Each unit includes a share and a warrant allowing the holder to buy a share for $2 over two years.

Lumina is a company held mainly by Vancouver mining entrepreneur Ross Beaty, chairman of Pan American Silver (PAA-T, PAAS-Q).

Ventana has been active in Colombia since 2005. Warke says a small family-run mining operation helped spark the company’s interest in the project.

“The La Bodega mine has been producing non-stop — it’s kept them going for something like a hundred years,”Warke estimates.

In total, the company has defined mineralization for 1,275 metres. The first 350 metres is the La Bodega zone, where the La Bodega artisanal mine is located. Another 200 metres is known as the La Rosa zone where the terrain is quite hilly, so much so, that the company had to stop drilling the target because it needed a helicopter to move the drill around.

That prompted Ventana to move farther east to test the La Mascota zone (725 metres).

The company has also identified the Las Mercedes zone about 400 metres south of La Bodega, where initial holes have been encouraging but more work is required.

The project is adjacent to Greystar Resources (GSL-T) Angostura gold-silver project which has a measured and indicated resource of 330 million tonnes grading 1.09 grams gold per tonne and 6 grams silver totaling 11.5 million oz. of gold.

The deposit also has an inferred resource of 90 million tonnes grading 1.19 grams gold per tonne and 6 grams silver totaling 3.5 million oz. gold.

Prior to working in Colombia, Warke spent many years working next door in Venezuela. “I didn’t want to go back there,” he says.

But Warke says Colombia has been cracking down on drug cartels, guerilla warfare and is in the process of rewriting its mining law.

The country welcomes foreign mining companies and the area where La Bodega is — the California- Vetas gold mining district — is well-known for mining.

But Warke says that in exploration, the odds are always stacked against you.

“So it’s not easy when you are living by the end of a drill bit but in this instance it was the right environment, the right geological structure,” Warke says. “We’ve done a lot of quality control, we double check pretty well all the drill results coming out, we’ve had independents coming down to the site to verify that; we are very cognizant of making sure things are done properly.”

The company might reap the benefits of its luck by way of a partnership with a mid-tier or major gold miner. Warke says quite a few have already been down to look at the site.