Recently announced bonanza silver and some impressive gold assays from a massive rock chip sampling program has prompted PolarX to expand its tenement holdings in Nevada’s Humboldt Range. The company says it has secured extensions of known mineralised gold-silver veins and newly discovered mineralised breccias in 358.7 hectares of additional ground.
PolarX has staked 45 new lode claims at Fourth of July, said to take in gossanous breccias and old mine workings. Sampling now underway on the new claims should generate assays in the next two-to-three weeks.
The Humboldt Range project takes in 318 lode mining claims for PolarX and the Black Canyon and Fourth of July leases sit between two large-scale mines – the Florida Canyon gold mine and Rochester silver-gold mine.
Exploration and mining over the years on Humboldt Range has shown a geology with bonanza-style epithermal precious metal deposits and bulk mineable epithermal gold-silver mineralisation. Records show that on the PolarX ground widespread narrow-vein mineralisation with visible gold was mined via adits and underground workings between 1865 and 1927.
This mineralisation occurs in swarms of high-grade epithermal quartz veins – reportedly between 1 centimetre to 3m – either as isolated veins or as broad areas of sheeted veins within zones of intensely altered and mineralised host rocks.
Fourth of July is at the southern end of the PolarX holdings and is less than 15km from the Rochester mine which hosts 400 million ounces of silver and 3 million oz of gold. The Black Canyon leases are less than 3km from the Florida Canyon mine which hosts about 5 million ounces of gold.
PolarX said current work in the Humboldt Range, taking in systematic sampling of all claims on a notional 200m-by-50m grid, sampling of mineralised veins and collection of ultra high-resolution ortho-photography, will be completed this week.
Recent sampling has returned grades as high as 76 grams/tonne gold on the Cottonwood veins on the southern leases and up to 4,800 g/t silver (154.34 oz) on an unnamed vein in the Arizona Canyon area.
Assays for vein samples at Black Canyon and grid soil samples are expected in July. Meanwhile, assays from grid soil sampling at Fourth of July are expected in the next few weeks and will be combined with geological mapping and vein assays to delineate preliminary drill targets.
PolarX said the technical team in Nevada would shortly relocate to Alaska to prepare a core drilling programme on the rich Caribou Dome copper project that has an established mineral resource of 2.8Mt grading 3.1 per cent copper.
The drilling in Alaska is expected to start in August.
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By Matt Birney
