Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
14:35 the intrusive rocks at Barytica. We have this pink intrusive system, it's of diorite composition, And it's very similar to the intrusive systems all up and down the mid-Kauka trend in terms of its age, its chemical composition, and its gold-rich nature. They're all associated, almost all of them are associated with intrusions of this chemical composition and this age, as I mentioned before, just reacting to local conditions. We'll see all the veins plotted on a more visible scale in the next slide. But as you can see, probably 90% of the veins are actually hosted within the pink unit, within the diorite, but the green unit where it has been hardened and silicified immediately adjacent to the intrusion is also an acceptable host.
15:30 We don't expect that to go too much beyond the contact zone into the green unit. Okay, just at a more reasonable scale to see, you'll notice that almost all of the veins are accompanied by small mine symbols. 80 years worth of artisanal mining continues to this day in the zone. Most of these veins have been found by the small miners over the last 80 years or so. And they are due to very thick soil and vegetation color. It's it's difficult to come up with anything new. And that leads to the soil sampling story I'll tell in a minute. In the inset comes from the 2016 Burytica technical report. And this is plotted at the same scale as the underlay. This is sort of the guts of the comparison with Beritica.
16:19 Beritica's then 11 million ounces, I suspected it significantly more than that by now, is entirely contained within that red box. And the reason that they can cram so many ounces into that small space is number 1, the number of veins. All those green plates are individually modeled high grade veins. And this is, they put that figure together based on 250,000 meters worth of drilling. And so it was a, they had a great deal of data to do it. Also, the very significant third dimension, they have a 1200 plus vertical meters of vein continuity. And we certainly, I think, compare very favorably with that. Also, as John mentioned, in between those veins, in several areas, they have some lower grade, but still economic grade mineralization tying those together, which will allow them to take much broader widths underground.
17:21 They're fortunate in that the quality of the rocks in terms of fracture density is such that they can do that. So now Let's compare those factors to what we have at Abri Aki. Again, the geology is very similar. The intrusions are the same. It's obviously a very gold rich system. When I first got to Buretica in 2007, almost none of those veins were evident. There were half a dozen small adits into the side of the hill from historical mining. There was a small sort of 25-ish ton per day mining operation, very profitable going on at the time, but only, oh, 5 to 10 veins were known of the current, probably 100 plus in that area right now.
18:06 And it really took drilling to identify what has since become truly a world-class deposit. Compare that scenario, just pre-drill, to what we have in the underlay at Abriaki just pre-drill. We know much more about the veins because so many more of them are exposed in small mines. We know much more about the grade, but I think the spacing of the veins within the northwest and east-west trending corridors at Abriaki corresponds very favorably with that at Beritica. We have several areas, as I'll see in the next slide, of this broad mineral zone equivalent. We can demonstrate, as I mentioned, a minimum 900 vertical meters of vein continuity.
18:57 And we have very high grades, too. All of those correspond very well to the Burytica model. But I think the big ace in the hole that we have is the precedent of Burytica itself. When we first started exploring Burytica, we had no idea what its potential was. Now we look at Abriakia in this embryonic pre-drill stage, And it's much easier for us and potential investors to envision what it could well become once we're at the same advanced drill. And then maybe you can talk about, again, I think you did touch on the great continuity, but perhaps again, describe a visual for what this BMZ looks like. Okay, good. Well, that's on slide 15, where we are now.
19:44 The underlay is the same geological slide I've simply superimposed the gold assays. And I don't know if you can see it on the scale we're looking at, but in the southeast corner, that's the high part of that valley. And going to the northwest up the axis of the pink unit, the intrusion, we're going down the valley and out to the northwest. You'll notice the purple circles are 20 plus gram per ton assays in gold. We're sort of arbitrarily defining the term high grade gold system as 20 plus gram potential. And at the very highest elevation at 2,800 meters, we're in 20 plus gram rock, all the way down to the 1,900 meter elevation, which is the lowest for which we have pre-drill information, we're still in an abundance of 20 gram per ton plus. And we've been up in the 140s in terms of the highest assays to date. So I think we can definitely demonstrate 3D continuity of the high grade. Now, in terms of the broad mineralized zone potential, We've seen several places in outcrop, which would be the lower photo inlay, where it's obviously not high-grade vein, it's not massive vein, but it's the stockwork looking stuff with silica stockwork with disseminated sulfides.
21:03 In the few places we've been able to sample it, we're getting sort of 1 to 5 grams. The particular one here is under an active waterfall. So that's been a tough one to sample. But in the upper inlay, This sort of tells the story. Those are some of our small miner friends who have developed in this particular photo over a width of 15 or 20 meters, they've developed 3 veins. And remember there it's artisanal scale mining with low metallurgical recoveries. So they're just taking the very high grade, sort of 0.5 meter wide core of these systems. We have gone in and sampled this area. We sampled all the interstitial material and that stuff in the foreground on the right. And everything in that photo runs at least a gram. It sort of runs that same sort of 1 to 5 gram range.
21:53 So this is very much a candidate for one of the Berytica-style broad mineral zones. As I said, we've seen several of these around the property. And the way that we are going to drill this thing with angle holes, drilling across families of veins, we're likely to intersect any of this that does exist. And we're very confident we'll see at least some of it. Okay, John, what do you want to talk about in the porphyry model? Let's talk about the ground-magnet program that we've done, the results that we've got, which is I think it was important here to distinguish that this is, we view this very much as a bonus. It is a bit of a surprise.
22:43 You know, our focus here is still the high-grade Vertica style vein system, and this is obviously, it's great when you get a bonus like this. You can see the fault lines there that I mentioned earlier. But, yes, Stu, tell us about the porphyry, please. Okay, well, The way that many companies, Anglo Gold notably, have gone about exploring this trend, they were specifically looking for porphyry-style deposits. And porphyry gold systems around the world have a very distinctive magnetic signature, most of them, certainly all the ones on this belt. And basically, you look for these intrusions of the right age, hopefully associated with pre-existing old gold districts. And then you look for these distinctive magnetic signature.
23:31 They covered a lot of ground flying it in a plane. We actually did it, slugged it out, cut lines through the bush and walked along the ground and did it on the scale of the whole property. This is not a porphyry gold. This is a magnetic anomaly, which we are hoping may represent a pore free gold. Time will tell. We have one of our first 10 drill holes planned to intersect this and 1 hole will be a sufficient test to tell us whether or not it is. You can see the large purple blob, the purples and reds are the high magnetic intensity colors. So we have an intense, small, intense magnetic anomaly, about 800 meters in diameter between the 2 East Northeast trending black lines, which are faults.
24:22 The reason that we're, have reason to believe that this may be porphyry related comes from outcrops at point A in the center of the map, very small outcrops, very limited aerial extent right in the bottom of the valley in the creek in very magnetic rock. We have gotten over a gram per ton, up to 1.1 grams per ton in a zone of alteration of a style that is typical in porphyry gold systems called potassic alteration that runs gold. And basically, that's what you want to see in a porphyry gold. To the north of that east-northeast trending fault where point A is, that's the upthrown block relative to the main magnetic anomaly, which is in the down dropped body. 3 dimensional magnetic modeling indicates that whatever that big purple blob is, that magnetic anomaly is contiguous down to a depth of at least 700 meters. So if it does turn out to be a gold-bearing porphyry, basically the whole thing is preserved. It's not been eroded down, and it will be present at easily drillable depths.
25:39 And as I mentioned, 1 hole will tell. As John mentioned, it's not the principal focus. I think we would much rather concentrate on high-grade veins, especially when we have so many of them so closely spaced. We had an investor ask the other day, wouldn't that complicate your decision-making process to have a big porphyry? How do you allocate time and resources, porphyry versus vein? I said, yeah, that'd be an issue, but it would be a wonderful issue to have. We would love to have to make those decisions. And as I said, only 10% of our initial drill project will be testing that. So We'll see. The ground mag program was related to that. While that was being planned, we took soil samples all along those ground mag lines.
26:32 This is significant actually. We've issued a couple of press releases providing details on these soil samples. I think it's important to really understand why it's significant and what it's telling us. So we've got a couple of slides that are going to, I think, really, really tell us more about the size of the target that we feel we're attacking here. OK, in the left photo, let's concentrate on that one. It's the main area of the veins plotted in red superimposed on a Google Earth image. As I mentioned, most all of the veins have small mines on them and that's how they were found. They were scratched out over 80 years by prospectors who were arguably better prospectors than modern geologists are.
27:21 Again, they need to feed their kids. So that's why they're better prospectors than we are. But basically there's very little outcrop is the moral of the story. And so typically in areas of very little outcrop, a good way to go about prospecting is to take soil samples and look at the amount of gold in soil. And then, because that generally represents what is just under the immediate soil horizon that you're standing on, just a few meters below. So it's pretty much in place, but it's things that you can't see. So what we did is we went and we took lines of soil samples represented by these individual colored dots over areas of known gold mineralization, over these east, west, and northwest trending corridors of veins.
28:09 And then we took that information, we went and filled in the entire grid, and so we have a baseline over known mineralization to export out into some of the areas where nothing is visible on surface. And lo and behold, most of the areas within and just outside of that main vein swarm, the anomalies we saw in soil outside of areas of known mineralization were every bit as high quality as the anomalies covering the known mineralization, which leads us to believe that we have a real good shot at finding more, perhaps a lot more of the veins and or this lower grade interstitial mineralization than we're actually aware of now. The nice thing is if we find it, it's going to be very close to areas of known mineralization.
28:58 We tweaked our drill program a little bit so that, just looking at the angle, so for instance on our way down in a drill hole to test 1 of these areas of veins, we will also test areas, covered areas that have good soil anomalies. And so we're highly optimistic that we're going to find more than just the 80-ish known veins that we have now. Looking at the inlay to the right, it's the same thing. It's, if you look at the inlay in the upper right corner, inlay within the inlay, you can see that that is the southeastern vein area. Logistics down there are a bit tougher. The miners, well, there are over 30 historical mines in that area, but you see the vein density, it's plotted at more or less the same scale, the vein density is less.
29:47 They need to walk in for A0A day to get there. So they're concentrating, the small miners cooperative that's done all this work is concentrating in the more accessible, road accessible, indeed, area to the left, the Northwest area. But looking at the quality of the soil anomalies, there are a couple of geophysical anomalies in this area down there too that we haven't talked about much. There will definitely be lots of targets in that area. We're blessed with such a wealth of targets. However, throughout this property, and as I said, the obvious place to start is in the Northwest. We probably won't even get around to exploring the Southeastern area for another year or so. It just speaks to the wealth of targets that we have. I just thought that was a good time to just kind of flip ahead and talk about, you know, this wealth of targets primarily in the north, because that's where we're focused now.
30:41 But again, you can see that what I think is a, you know, a world-class soil anomaly that really kind of aggregates all those dots and makes them a little better understand. So Stu, maybe you want to expand on that. Okay, we're back in the Northwest vein area, still in red. Plotted just basically the main models of the veins themselves, the dashed purple line a little bit to the south of the veins is the outline of that magnetic anomaly, which is the porphyry target idea. The yellow, as John mentioned, I just basically plotted the 100 part per billion contour in soils of golden soils. And that's a 600, a continuous 600 by 800 meter anomaly. So these are basically the data points, the data sets, the principal ones on which we plotted our drill program.
31:34 The light blue lines are the trace to the horizontal, the projection to the horizontal of angled drill holes. So we're angling these at about 45 degrees downward from the surface. And You can see the basic drill philosophy. With these 10 holes, we're covering at least a first pass test of all of the major east-west and Northwest trending vein corridors. The Northwest trending corridor is over 1200 meters long up to 350 meters wide, and it has many veins within it. The principal East-West trending corridor is somewhat shorter, but wider, a larger number of veins. I particularly, I and any other structural geologist would tell you the place to drill is where those 2 vein systems intersect. Generally, you get fluid ponding in areas where you have vein intersections and you have a chance for higher grades and or thicknesses. So as you can see, we'll be drilling that intersection zone too.
32:38 So this is the first 10-hole program. We have begun the program. We're not very far into it. I can't say anything about the results. We don't have any assays left. But the hole that we started in is from the middle platform, it's hole C1 drilled to the southwest, to the southwest from that middle platform across the Northwest trending vein system. So we can go back now. The next slide is a vertical cross section. We're looking to the northwest. So what we've plotted here, the pink is the host diorite unit. That's real topography. That's the real slope. There's no vertical exaggeration. This is quite steep country. On this we've plotted the individual colored dots on the surface are the soil samples.
33:26 And the vertical red lines are, we just arbitrarily projected these steeply dipping veins as vertical for the purposes of this section. This is not a post drilling section. This is a pre-drilling planning section. But those are the veins that we see on the surface in this section. So there are 123458 or 9 of them that this hole is programmed to test. You can see there are 2 samples plotted a very near surface, the 26 gram sample, the 51 gram sample. Those are taken on 2 of these veins from shallow mine workings. Those are not the highest grades we're seeing by any means, nor are they the lowest. Those are good representative abriaci vein values.
34:16 Just to test. So as you can see the soil anomalies, the yellow is greater than 100 ppb, the orange greater than 300, the red is greater than a gram per ton in soils. So You can see the 2 1 gram per ton soils correspond very well to those 2 high grade veins. But you can also see a bunch of areas on the surface where we have plus hundred part per billion golden soils that are not explained by known veins. And that's a good example of some of these areas that were drill testing. So every one of our drill sections, if we plotted up all 10 of these, would look pretty much just like this. 45, 50 degree angled holes, testing entire families of veins, with several veins at least being programmed to be intersected by these holes.
35:08 Okay, so, and then all of this, I guess if we took all of those recent slides and put them all together to try and demonstrate all of these targets that exist and you know explaining in a visual format why how we trace the vertical extent of these veins maybe Stu you can fit together according to this model. Yeah this is I'm calling this a semi schematic section because it is to scale vertical and horizontal scale. I'm just cramming all the 3 known mineralization types that we've seen into the plane of the same section. This is a northwest on the left to southeast section. So this is along the axis, the long axis of the pink diorite intrusion from the geologic maps from the low topographic point up to the top of the hill.
36:02 You can see our justification for claiming a minimum 8 or 900 vertical meters of vein continuity before we even start drilling. That's simply based on outcrops and topography. You can see the place on the surface, that first arrow on the left, that's the one place where we see that zone of potassium alteration with up to a gram plus gold in it, very small outcrop area, then the 2 faults. And then I'm modeling the pink blob between the faults as if it were a porphyry. Again, that's not yet tested, but it's true to the 3D modeling that we've done of the magnetic anomaly. Just subsurface down to a depth of at least 700 meters. If that is a porphyry, that's where it's gonna be more or less.
36:54 And as you can see with the drill rig we have right now has a capacity of up to 900 vertical meters. So we will very easily be able to test that. We'll be drilling an angle hole to the left, testing that family of veins. We simply turn the drill around and angle it to the right, and we can test right down through that magnetic anomaly and find out what it is. There is a third type of mineralization we haven't talked about much. We have a few reconnaissance samples on it. It's the one at the very top of the hill. It's a bedded style replacement unit called mantos. It's essentially tabular bedding replacement of individual beds within the sedimentary sequence, remembering that that green unit is a group of marine sedimentary rocks. That particular mantle that we've identified is 20 to 25 meters thick.
37:45 Again, we have it's way up at the top of the hill. Logistically, it's not something that we could get to in the short term anyway. We've had so much work to do with all these other higher priority targets. We haven't concentrated on it, but that target style, that mineralization style is a future target because if there's one of these, we're likely to be able to find more of them. So again, that's number 65B on the list of target that's in mind for the future, we're not gonna forget about it. Great. No, that's pretty much the technical part, I guess. Turn it back to John. Why don't we deal with a couple of questions that we have related to drilling, talk about the progression of the holes that we're gonna drill. This 10-hole program we're looking at now, 4,500 meters, will probably conclude in January or February. As John mentioned, first assays probably within a month, hopefully within a month.
38:45 This is, we have a budgeted 6,000 meters and we're funded for 6,000 meters. And this only represents 4,500 of them. I know priorities are gonna change after we do this first basic test. So there was no point in specifically plotting all the meters. But 10 holes, probably final results for those 10 holes end of first quarter next year. Maybe, actually, we have a good big drill, which is getting on average, when they don't have mechanical problems, about 60 meters a day. So 8 or 10 days per hole. Some of these holes, our first hole got down to 600 meters.
39:34 And the core recovery has been excellent. So we're really going to be able to believe the numbers that we get. We're not looking at 50% core recoveries in the veins. It's been 100% in vein and in all rock. So that's good news. And it probably bodes well for the future should we develop an underground mine, because the engineers certainly like rock that's not all fractured and it really lowers your mining costs. How many meters drilled to date? I see one. We drilled, as I mentioned, about 600 meters of this 4,500 meters to date. Okay. Well, there was 1 security question, just quickly. This is not an area where historically there's been much in way of security issues and Columbia in general is much more secure than it was certainly within when I showed up in 2007.
40:27 So security we don't really look at as a significant issue at all. Certainly not a rate limiting step. Okay, thank you everyone. Please feel free to contact us with any follow up, any questions. Stay tuned. Thanks very much.