Kingwest Resources has rounded out the year well at its Menzies gold project with the First Hit prospect returning some very nice gold hits including 2.48 meters grading 23.22 grams per tonne that included almost half a metre going a whopping 110g/t – or 3.5 ounces to the tonne gold.
Solid gold hits have rolled off the drill bit at will for Kingwest this year as the company targeted its diamond holes into five different prospects at the Menzies Gold project – Selkirk, Pericles, Yunndaga, Lady Shenton and First Hit.
First Hit took line honours for the overall best intercept of the year, with 57.6 gram metres from 121.52m downhole, closely followed by Pericles with 41.5 gram metres from 125.27m downhole.
The company also recently tabled some sensational results from Yunndaga, including the discovery of a new lode above the Princess May deposit that returned 1.3m grading nearly 20g/t gold, with a 0.3m zone grading 64.4g/t.
Underneath the historical Princes May stope, drilling also intercepted 2.28m grading 17.87g/t gold from 99.65m downhole.
Princess May was historically mined to 600 vertical meters below surface and produced 271,000 ounces of gold at a smashing 16g/t.
Interestingly, before 2019, only 20 holes were drilled into Kingwest’s Menzies project that were greater than 200m deep over the entire 10 kilometres strike.
Kingwest CEO Ed Turner said: “The first modern focused test for further high-grade underground mineralisation, for which the Menzies Goldfield is famous, has been very successful in delivering high grade gold at every target area tested…”
In November, Kingwest intersected another previously unidentified lode, over 100m west of Lady Shenton with another solid hit of 2.90m grading 5.84g/t gold from 52.1m downhole which included 0.30m grading 45.8g/t gold.
Historical production at Menzies was around 800,000 ounces at a solid 19g/t gold, including a portion of underground gold produced at an impressive grade of 22.5g/t.
To further illustrate the character of these high-grade deposits, the quartz vein that went 110g/t gold from First Hit was established from assaying half a 45-centimetre piece of diamond core. Company Geologists spied visible gold in this quartz vein and as a general rule, when the gold is visible in the core, the assays will be highly anticipated.
The other half of this quartz vein was also submitted for assay and returned 0.41g/t gold. The moral of the story being that nuggety gold deposits can return quite variable grades and Kingwest will have to drill more holes to more accurately estimate the value of the gold in the ground.
The global resource over the Menzies gold project currently sits at 2.42 million tonnes grading 2.2g/t for 171,310 ounces of gold from the Yunndaga, Pericles, Bellenger and Warrior deposits.
Kingwest says that drilling to date has well met its expectations and the rocks are directly comparable to other high-grade, narrow gold mines such as the nearby Kundana with its impressive resource of 1.4 million ounces grading 4.8g/t gold and an average width of just 0.65m.
Grade is certainly King at Menzies and the company has eked out considerable success with the drill bit there this year. Kingwest now has its pick of high-grade targets to follow up, which should make for some very interesting results to come in 2020.
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By Matt Birney
