Q-Gold Resources Ltd., a company focusing on Canadian gold mining, announced last week that a new, significant style of mineralization has been identified adjacent to its Golden Star Mine vein complex near Mine Centre.
“It’s very good,” local exploration manager Jack Bolen enthused. “There’s the potential for a lot of tonnage.
“It was surprising how much gold and copper is in it,” he added.
The discovery, which consists of mineralized, sheared meta-volcanic rocks, establishes the presence of high-grade gold and base metal mineralization in two of the dominant rock types on Q-Gold’s 18,740-acre property.
A “grade sample” from a five-metre wide shear zone in the meta-volcanics assayed 2.19 grams/tonne of gold and 1.63 percent copper.
Bolen noted there are nine shear structures no one has ever looked at before.
“The shear structures are totally different than veins,” he explained. “It means the rock has moved and torn in two different directions.
“The mineralization is found along the fracture, making it larger than quartz veins.”
He said the shear structures can be a kilometre or so long, and 10-20 metres wide, while a vein is about one metre wide on average.
Bolen figures it’s possible the company will start drilling in April since there are five shear zones on land. But the best ones are lying under the lake, so they’ll have to wait another winter to get some ice—preferrably 36 inches worth.
In addition to the discovery of gold-copper mineralization, Q-Gold also announced in a press release that it received more positive results from gold assays on two additional surface veins from its trenching program this past fall.
The weighted average of gold values ranges from about 1.0 to 6.5 g/t, which has been established from the five recently-trenched gold-bearing quartz veins in the Foley Mine complex.
The final assays on the North Sulfide Vein yielded a weighted average of 1.19 g/t gold, 24.11 g/t silver, and 0.38 percent zinc from nine trenches.
All five quartz veins trenched in the Foley Mine complex consistently are mineralized with gold, silver, sphalerite, galena, pyrite, and minor chalcopyrite and bornite.
“The assaying is done,” said Bolen. “Then we’ll start some more trenching, blasting, and sampling in the spring with a new phase.”
Until then, he said the company will work on 100 km of line cutting (constructing parallel grids), geophysics, and airborne surveys to measure conductivity and magnetics.
“This will give us an idea of geology, an idea of mineralization, and define our targets so we know where to trench and drill,” Bolen explained.
“We’re still in the early stages, but we’re excited about the larger targets we didn’t even know existed,” he added.
He said the Mine Centre area is a structurally complex area, “but we’re starting to get our hands on it.”
Still, the press release warned “these statements are based on current expectations that involve a number of risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those anticipated.”
