 A brief conversation with Quinton Hennigh, President and Director of Evolving Gold Corp. |
Cripple Creek Colorado has been producing gold for a hundred years. Over 20 million ounces. Does Wyoming have its own Cripple Creek?
Junior gold explorer Evolving Gold thinks there may be a gold deposit like Cripple Creek in the Rattlesnake Hills, right in the middle of Wyoming. It’s still early days, but Evolving Gold’s CEO, Dr. Robert Barker, likes what he sees so far.
“Our drilling confirms the presence of significant gold mineralization” says Barker who has managed exploration programs around the world.
“We are seeing intervals of high grade gold and something that is even more exciting to us, very long intervals of “halo” gold mineralization that may represent a very large target, starting at the surface.”
Asked how this compares to Cripple Creek, Barker explains, “In the early days of Cripple Creek the miners focused on mining rich veins of gold with labor intensive underground mining operations. Eventually they mined out those high grade veins. Now AngloGold Ashanti is operating a series of open pits and a large heap leach pad. They produce about 300,000 ounces of gold each year from the deposits of lower grade gold mineralization that form a halo around those higher grade gold veins. What we see in our preliminary drilling at Rattlesnake Hills suggests a similar system of high grade gold mineralization surrounded by an extensive halo of lower grade gold values.”
Heading into the 2009 drilling season, Barker, admits “We have only just begun our work on this exciting project. None of our targets are drilled out. All of them are still open. I’m really looking forward to the results of this year’s drill program. At the end of the program we should be able to ‘get our arms around’ this gold system and start to understand the full potential and size of this gold deposit.”
“So far our drilling at North Stock shows an extensive area of gold mineralization. We estimate it is 450 meters long, 200 meters wide, and extends to at least 550 meters in depth. It’s still open to the west, east, south and at depth, and it may continue to the north as it wraps around the North Stock diatreme breccia. We also found similar gold mineralization in our drill hole in Antelope Basin, 725 meters to the south. Alteration and structural features support continuation of gold mineralization through Antelope Basin and on south an additional 250 meters to the South Stock area. So far all three areas appear to be part of one large gold system.”
“At their Cripple Creek open pit and heap leach operation AngloGold Ashanti uses a cutoff gold grade of .25 grams per tonne. Using the same cutoff at Rattlesnake Hills, our drilling indicates an average grade of .96 gpt. As an average grade, this compares very well with a number of large, open pit milling operations around the world.”
“We’ve begun the very early stages of metallurgical work on the core we drilled last year” said Barker. “We’ve started some simple bottle roll leach tests, but we plan to initiate gravity and floatation concentration tests as well. These tests will start to tell us how we can best recover the gold, and give us some really good economic guidelines. We have also run metallic screen fire assays on a lot of our core. On average we’re seeing about a 10% improvement in grade as a result of this program, and that’s really significant considering the extent of the mineralization.
The drilling season at Rattlesnake Hills is controlled by the weather, but Evolving plans to have three core rigs on site by late April or early May in a program to drill 30-35 drill holes for a total of 12,000-15,000 meters of drilling. “Unlike last year when drill rigs and experienced crews were tough to find, this year, because of the recession, drill rigs are a little easier to come by. We’ve also been promised faster turnaround times on our assay results. The slow turnaround last year was frustrating for us, and I imagine for our shareholders as well. We’re optimistic that this year we’ll get our results from the labs much more quickly.”
It has been a tough year for the stock market in general and junior exploration companies in particular. “Of course we’d like Evolving’s shares to more fully reflect the value of what we believe we’ve discovered on our Rattlesnake project. However, the fact is that with about C$17 million in our treasury we have more than enough money to complete this year’s multi million dollar drill program.”
Asked when he anticipates releasing a 43-101 resource estimate, Dr. Barker took a wait and see approach. “Let’s see what this year’s drilling shows. All our targets are still open. We’ll report our drill results as we get them and I think investors will have a pretty good idea of the size and importance of the Rattlesnake Hills gold system as the summer progresses. By the end of the season our geologists should have a much better idea of the geometry, size, grade and overall economics of this discovery.”
Wyoming was just ranked #2 on the Fraser Institute’s Policy Potential Index which measures how receptive a jurisdiction is to mining. With the results to date from Evolving Gold’s work at the Rattlesnake Hills, Wyoming has a large, new gold discovery to add to a long history of mining.
