Warriedar Resources has set its sights on extending its base metals and gold resource with a second round of drilling at its Fields Find project in Western Australia’s Mid West region after completing its 4672m phase-one campaign.
The company today revealed plans for early next month to launch a new program designed to test other targets in the same area at its Fields Find West deposit, in addition to probing its 31,000-ounce Rothschild gold resource for further extensions.
It says its initial reverse-circulation (RC) program plunged 17 drillholes into its Warriedar Copper (copper-gold), Falcon (nickel-copper), Mopoke (gold-copper) and Sandpiper (gold-copper) prospects in the central corridor of the project area, with analytical results expected to be returned within six weeks. The second round of RC drilling is set to probe up to seven other targets in the same area – and the company is optimistic the work will turn up its best results yet.
The campaign will take in Warriedar’s Reids Ridge (gold), Golden Eagle (gold-copper), Fields Find Gold Mine (gold) and Weiro prospects, in addition to other nickel-copper-platinum group elements (PGE) targets indicated by geophysical electromagnetic plate models or by airborne and/or ground electromagnetics traverses.
The company says additional work needs to be done to refine some of the targets before the phase-two drilling begins. It is expected to include ground geophysics and soil geochemistry and environmental surveys to complete its program of work notifications.
Overall, the unusual variety of target styles within an area that measures just 15km-by-10km is testimony to its structural and geochemical complexity – and its potential.
The team is pumped to finally be drilling at Fields Find West. It’s the potential size of the prize there that is most compelling. We have decent copper, nickel and gold in drilling from previous explorers, coupled with our new EM data giving us an objective treasure map. A very exciting stage of exploration for us. Warriedar Resources managing director Amanda Buckingham
Management describes its Fields Find project, which sits about 400km north-east of Perth, as a structurally complex area that offers at least 10 high-priority base metal and gold exploration targets.
The phase-two drilling campaign is slated to include extensional drilling of Warriedar’s Rothschild gold deposit that is situated on a separate mining lease in the eastern extremity of the Fields Find project area. Drilling campaigns at Rothschild since April have returned encouraging results that the company says increasingly suggests the potential for a big “sleeper” – a massive gold deposit with multi-lode growth possibilities.
It remains open along strike and at depth, where gold mineralisation is already proven to extend in depth to 230m below surface. Grade and widths increase with depth on the western side of the main deposit and results also define additional lodes.
Management recently identified a parallel southern lode that it says demonstrates significant potential for a much bigger system.
The company says it is not just seeking immediate extensions to the growing known mineralisation, but also accelerating exploration and scout-drilling to identify possible “Rothschild analogues” with similar geophysical responses over a bigger area within the mining lease. It includes the Stone Hut gold prospect, immediately south-west of the historic Rothschild gold mine.
The next stage of RC drilling at Rothschild, scheduled for about 2100m of drilling, is designed to test for further extensions of the main lode along strike and down dip, as well as step-out drilling of the interpreted northern and southern lodes. The program is expected to lead to an updated resource estimate in this year’s final quarter.
Exploration through the broader Rothschild mining licence area has included 12 RC drillholes for 2287m in the Stone Hut area, about 1km south-west of the Rothschild main load. The program returned a best result of 2m at a grade of 4.02 grams per tonne gold from a relatively narrow structure.
While at first blush it appeared additional work was required to unravel the local controls on mineralisation, a reported historic drill intercept of 9m at a grade of 5.21g/t gold suggests that the gold potential of the Stone Hut area should not be written off just yet.
Other rock-chip sampling carried out over selected areas of the broader Rothschild licence returned positive results, including an assay of 13.1g/t gold on the edge of a strongly-magnetic and structurally-complex lithological unit about 200m west of Stone Hut. The company says it warrants follow-up exploration.
Warriedar is scouting a potentially significant gold camp on the eastern side of its Fields Find project and it will be interesting to see just how the project evolves in the upcoming geophysical, geochemical and drilling programs.
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