Corvus said that the new high-grade feeder zone shows good continuity and could expand the Mother Lode gold system’s grade and size in the northern end of the deposit.
Corvus plans to follow up on the feeder target with initial drilling of this untested area of the property
“The continued expansion of the Mother Lode system continues to support the idea of a large-scale new eastern Bullfrog District gold system,” Jeffrey Pontius, the company’s president and CEO, stated in a press release. “This system appears to be large with various deposits representing the full spectrum of gold depositional environments.”
Corvus said that like results from the previously reported high-grade feeder discovery hole, ML20-159CT, which returned 83.93 metres grading 2.7 grams gold and 6.82 grams silver from 326.87 metres, the mineralisation in the latest hole appears to be associated with the lower intrusives dike/breccia system of the CIZ target and extends up into the Mother Lode deposit’s Main zone.
The highly productive Northern Feeder zone, the company said, is open to the north and northeast along the Fluorspar Canyon Fault, which trends toward the eastern end of the new Lynnda Strip discovery, about 2.5 km northeast of Mother Lode.
Corvus plans to follow up on the feeder target with initial drilling of this untested area of the property.
The Mother Lode deposit is part of the Eastern Bullfrog mining district, which also contains Coeur Mining’s (NYSE: CDE) C-Horst, Daisy, Secret Pass, and SNA deposits and AngloGold Ashanti’s (NYSE: AU) Silicon project. All of which, Corvus said, are possibly related to one large, evolving gold system, localised along the southwestern edge of the Timber Mountain caldera.
In November 2020, a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) for Mother Lode envisaged an open-pit mine, with a heap leach pad for the oxide mineralisation and a biological oxidation mill for the higher-grade sulphide mineralisation, producing 170,980 oz. of gold and 79,600 oz. of silver per year over an eight-year mine life.
The study pegged initial capital costs at $406 million with average all-in sustaining costs of $677 per oz. gold for the first three years of production. The PEA, which used a gold price of $1,500 per oz., estimated the after-tax net present value to be $303 million, at a 5% discount rate, with an internal rate of return of 23%.
Mineral resources stand at 60.24 million tonnes in the measured and indicated category grading 0.8 gram gold per tonne and 0.78 gram silver per tonne for 1.55 million oz. contained gold and 1.51 million oz. of silver. Inferred resources add 9.86 million tonnes grading 0.55 gram gold and 1.26 grams silver for 173,000 oz. of gold and 399,000 oz. of silver.
In a research note to investors, Canaccord Genuity analyst Tom Gallo has a hold rating on the company and a target price of C$3.50 per share. The company is currently trading at C$3.24 per share within a 52-week trading range of 98.5¢ and C$4.26. It has about 126 million common shares outstanding for a C$409.5 million market capitalization.
(This article first appeared in The Northern Miner)
