Read on for an interview with Mr. Bruce Ballantyne, Project Manager for Jaxon Mining (TSXV:JAX), where we discuss a series of photographs of “tourmaline breccia pipes” that Jaxon first found in the end of the 2017 field season. Recorded May 24, 2018 with Bruce Ballantyne.
Peter Bell: As you said, Bruce, these rocks talk to you. I don’t know what they’re saying, but they’re sure saying something! These are pretty unique rocks.
Bruce Ballantyne: As we try to map this out, we will search for a contact. Everybody keeps asking me how wide are the breccias? Well, I don't know yet. Maybe we can move some boulders around to see if we can measure how wide our tourmaline breccia is, but it’s early days. That's what we're up against now.
Peter Bell: And I wonder if you would have even sampled this tourmaline last year before you had indications of gold in the area. Would there be any point in sampling any of that rock for assay?
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, we will sample stuff like that now based on what know. Before, I was sampling more of the sulphide-rich material.
Peter Bell: And you had some joy from that. Sounds like it was the right place to start and ultimately it is all about finding the places where the sulphides cement the tourmaline breccia. What next?
>> A picture of with big chunks of tourmaline mixed in with the breccia.
Picture descriptions:
1. Black tourmaline rich vein with sulphides.
Bruce Ballantyne: Here’s another picture of the breccia where you can see all these different textures of rocks. Big chunk of tourmaline mixed in with the breccia.
Peter Bell: Not manganese?
Bruce Ballantyne: No way, these are hard crystals of black dravite, boron silicate.
Peter Bell: Right. You said initially about the pressure causing the creation of the crystals. Manganese is the one thing I’ve heard about as being distinctively black, but it’s also soft enough to push with your fingernail. Great stuff, thanks for the laugh Bruce.
Bruce Ballantyne: You bet, Peter. Can you see the tourmaline cementing all the little fragments together in this picture?
Peter Bell: Yes, I can see that. It’s very apparent.
Bruce Ballantyne: If we look close, in some cases, there are little vugs still left behind where everything wasn’t fully crystallized. That's one classic photo of crackle texture.
Peter Bell: I’m sure that raises some interesting questions about how long things were cooking away before the volcano exploded, but you’ve said that there were probably multiple events here too. Lots of geology to be done here ahead of you. What an exciting project.
>> “How far did that roll down the hill? Can we see these things in place? Those are good questions. We'll keep looking and figure it out.”
Picture descriptions:
1. Crackle texture vuggy dravite cement tourmaline matrix.
2. Sulphide-bearing tourmaline breccia.
Bruce Ballantyne: Here’s another photo of a big boulder, too. How far did that roll down the hill? Can we see these things in place? Those are good questions. We'll keep looking and figure it out. In the other districts we discussed that Chakana and Xanadu have, you can count all of the pipes. One may have 9 or another has 10. That’s a good way to approach these targets and we're going to do that in each one of our cirques. We want to be able to find all that same kind of information out about CRT-RS.
Bruce Ballantyne: Now, look at this. This photo is from the South Tourmaline – a bit of rock stalking for you. I was walking around here and was awful excited when I saw this because it is classic: the tiny fragments at the head of the black rock coming up, which is tourmaline, and there alteration of the country rock on each side is clearly visible.
Peter Bell: I’ve never seen anything like it.
Bruce Ballantyne: When these missiles are trying to come to surface, they carry all kinds of things and make these little fractures where fluids of water and gas can come up and go out as far as they can and then – whoomph – there’s an explosion. This is a decompression shock texture. Classic.
Peter Bell: Again, I've never seen anything like it.
Bruce Ballantyne: No, you've got to be in one of these systems to see this kind of thing because these systems are so bizarre.
>> A bit of rock stalking, “I was walking around here and was awful excited when I saw this because it is classic: the tiny fragments at the head of the black rock coming up, which is tourmaline, and there alteration of the country rock on each side is clearly visible.”
Picture descriptions:
1. Decompression shock texture apparent in orbicular vapour alteration front.
2. Spear-head decompression shock texture containing black, boron-rich tourmaline core and vapour-bleached wall rocks along fracture.
Bruce Ballantyne: We also get this beautiful orbicular type alteration fronts like this. The gas or water was coming up and just ruined the rock.
Peter Bell: Wait second. That curved bit of rock looks like a separate piece of rock. Is that all part of one boulder?
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes.
Peter Bell: I can barely even see that with my eyes. I literally though that was some weird curved rock with some alteration sitting on top of a piece of the country rock. These really are bizarre systems.
Bruce Ballantyne: If that wasn't so big, I would have brought it home. I'd saw it in half so that people can actually realize what it looks like.
Peter Bell: At least you've got a photograph of it! People will have to do a double-take to even see what it is here. That's something that intruded?
Bruce Ballantyne: Intruded and blew up.
Peter Bell: I don't see many fractures or stresses in the surrounding rock.
Bruce Ballantyne: See the crack here? It tried.
Peter Bell: Fair enough. Again, the more I look at the picture the more cracks I see.
Bruce Ballantyne: The key thing is that we’re seeing the right kinds of textures at this early stage.
>> “More talking rocks. Here's your little white guys, you can put these back together, they're all fractured and broken. There is tourmaline, quartz, and sulfides all intermixed here.”
Picture descriptions:
1. Blocks of quartz with sulphides and black tourmaline breccia littered on the scree slope.
2. Very well-fractured wall rock transitioning to breccia with sub-angular bleached clasts and black tourmaline veinlet cement.
Bruce Ballantyne: More talking rocks. Here's your little white guys, you can put these back together, they're all fractured and broken. There is tourmaline, quartz, and sulfides all intermixed here.
Peter Bell: Quartz! That’s the first time I’ve heard you talk about quartz in these things. The Xanadu presentation had some nice pictures of quartz veins with gold and copper near surface – the other main source of high-grade material in their resource estimates. I believe they describe it as “Shallow high-grade gold-rich porphyry mineralisation”, but I wondered if could connect to tourmaline breccia they found at depth in the same Altan Tolgoi deposit. I mention it again because there is some black stuff in those quartz veins and I wonder if it’s tourmaline. Anyway, you were saying?
Bruce Ballantyne: Just that, eventually, we want to see our breccias on the edge having a lot more chalcopyrite coming in.
Peter Bell: Simple enough! I’m with you, Bruce. How about these angular shapes on the white rocks in the picture above?
Bruce Ballantyne: Catastrophic – indicative of a catastrophic event. All you've got to do is look at that.
>> “This is better altered material than the others. There's different alteration here, but it's pretty plain rock otherwise. Remember how we had those white slabs versus the black ones? Look at this, look at that line in there with all those little pieces mixed together… Yes, there are sulfides in there. And look how these are more rounded, whereas the others are more shardy. This is a diagnostic feature of the core of breccia pipe.”
Picture descriptions:
1. Catastrophic, milled, intrusive clast with black matrix cement tourmaline breccia.
2. Catastrophic crackle tourmaline breccia texture.
Peter Bell: It looks like the one from the book.
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, that's a true breccia.
Peter Bell: And the black stuff is tourmaline?
Peter Bell: Yes, it is.
Bruce Ballantyne: This is better altered material than the others. There's different alteration here, but it's pretty plain rock otherwise. Remember how we had those white slabs versus the black ones? Look at this, look at that line in there with all those little pieces mixed together. Now we have to go map these things, which may provide very valuable information because we get to see them in place. We may have to dig around a bit, but we don’t need to drill to see these things.
Picture descriptions:
1. Rock showing a mix of quartz, sulphides, and black tourmaline breccia
2. Sulphide tourmaline veins and breccia hosted in diorite intrusion.
Peter Bell: It looks like there’s some sparkly stuff in that picture!
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, there are sulfides in there. And look how these are more rounded, whereas the others are more shardy. This is a diagnostic feature of the core of breccia pipe.
Peter Bell: Oh, wow. Not only can you find these things in place at surface and start guessing at the size of the pipe, but you can say something about what part of the pipe is where based on this model of the pipe, too. Amazing.
Bruce Ballantyne: That’s right. And then it’s just a case of finding some with more sulfides in them. We might find some at surface or we may have to go down a hundred meters or so.
Peter Bell: To get down below the oxidation zone into the fresh sulphides.
Picture descriptions:
1. Shock fractures with tourmaline veins between breccia bodies.
2. Sheeted tourmaline vein swarms intruding country rocks.
3. Detail showing decompression shock texture containing black, boron-rich tourmaline core and vapour-bleached wall rocks along fracture.
Bruce Ballantyne: This is what it looks like up on the ridge, way up in here. As you come around these places where you've got more tourmaline and everything, and in these systems, the full scale system, you get these shocks or bleeds of swarms of veins intruding the rocks in between the tourmaline breccia bodies.
Bruce Ballantyne: Here's a good example of that up close. See the veins, one, two, three, just invading and causing real bleaching. There's the breccia again.
Peter Bell: Beautiful.
Bruce Ballantyne: And there's the sheeted edge again, too.
>> Pic 13: Picture of the main cirque. “These great scars of red and everything are extremely diagnostic to me. This red color is different than what you see with plain iron pyrite weathering away.”
Bruce Ballantyne: This is what we call the main cirque. This is an important area for us based on what we’re seeing in the rocks, visually, and based on our assays from last year. These great scars of red and everything are extremely diagnostic to me. This red color is different than what you see with plain iron pyrite weathering away. We have these slashes coming down the hill over here and throughout that cirque, which is a main cirque with a lake. It’s an important area, structurally. And that cluster of green dots in our map was all along this ridge! Samples with 10 grams per tonne gold all the way along here on that ridge. It was very important to find all that gold around here and we're going to examine all of these and get onto this thing for the first time.
Peter Bell: Look at all the rock you have to work with, too. You may have to rappel down some of those rock faces – it looks steep.
Bruce Ballantyne: I have a good climber. If there are any indications of sulphides in place, then we'd sample across it.
Peter Bell: I can see lots of interesting areas in this picture.
Bruce Ballantyne: To start, we're going to be walking along these ridge lines because some of the stuff we’ve seen on the hillside rolled down from above. We’re going to start up there and work our way down. We will also take stream sediments at all of these streams because hydrogeochemistry can be a direct method at this area. We take water samples at all of these streams because it's diagnostic of the hydrology and hot spots can be very focused because it is so close to the source.
Peter Bell: That’s interesting because hydrogeochemistry is typically something I think of as being more regional. Anyway, this alpine hillside you’re working on has no soils to sample and no trees for biogeochem, but you've got rock and water. Use what you have!
Bruce Ballantyne: That's right.
It took me a while to get my head around this because we'd only been here one day. Here's the little lake and all the 10-gram samples are along a ridge here. If you look at the wall in this photo, then you will see one slash, another, and a third one.
I started to see some odd things in this wall. It’s hard to explain at this point, but it looks like the mega-scale breccia body from the smaller rock specimens we were getting.
My speculation is that a lot of what is cementing these rocks together in these slashes is all tourmaline. If that is correct, then it would suggest that we're actually in some larger tourmaline-rich breccia body.
Peter Bell: Could you get a sense for where the center of the pipe is? It looks really messy.
Bruce Ballantyne: Peter, this could be kilometers wide. We haven't sampled any of this kind of stuff yet. We've sampled the sulfides, but we haven’t sampled the tourmaline with all these different textures going in different directions to get a feel for what's going on.
Peter Bell: Imagine if those slashes are tourmaline-rich and they have significant gold. They look like they’re a few meters across or so. Very interesting! How about these bands, what is going on there?
Bruce Ballantyne: I think that's all part of it. Right now, they're just altered rocks that are bleaching a bit better than others but we’ve seen that before. The other thing that we've done, is use PhotoSat. We'll work with them closely in a few ways. For one thing, we will take pixels from the land sat imagery – one of the last good images for this area was done in September of 2006 – and use the coloration of known areas of interest to search for other areas. This area I just described is very close to a little lake and you can see red rusty diagnostic colors that are big enough to serve as a pixel designation the satellite could read. When it reads the response, it gives a diagnostic signal, and then we can choose to search for anything else sticking out of the ground like that. That's one of the modelling exercises we've done.
It’s important for us to do that work and create maps from it. We know this first one is auriferous with all these samples of +10 grams per tonne gold and it still has some copper left behind, with greater or lesser amounts of tourmaline. If we can specify that as a pixel in a satellite image then it will help us find other areas that may be the same. Recall that these intercontinental ballistic missiles typically appear in clusters, right?
Peter Bell: Right! That could be a great way to count them up on a first-pass basis. You’d have to ground-truth them after that, but it’s a great way to build a list of targets.
A random question for you about the metals. You saw good gold grades but low copper numbers. That’s to be expected with the leaching happening here, which moves the copper but not the gold. Does the tourmaline go with the copper or stay with the gold as this thing oxidizes?
Bruce Ballantyne: The tourmaline stays put.
Peter Bell: That’s helpful because it means that you should expect to see it in the samples. All that makes for a good field program for you here.
Bruce Ballantyne: I agree. Where are the good outcrops? We can do channel samples and other things on whatever we might find.
Let me come back to Xanadu Mines for a moment, as they have a pretty big outcrop of tourmaline. When I first started looking at these slashes at CRT-RS and thinking about the tourmaline cementing these rocks together as an indication of a large tourmaline-rich breccia body, I thought, "It can't be that big. These things are pipes – it can't be that big."
Peter Bell: Yeah, yeah. 600 meters across, that's ...
Bruce Ballantyne: So, god dammit. What happens? I get into this bloody thing here, this program, and all the different results that they put out, and beautiful chalcopyrites, embedding tourmaline beds, and you've seen that before.
That's what we're shooting for. We don't want any just plain, ordinary, tourmaline copper breccias. They're a thing of the past.
Peter Bell: If the chalcopyrite had oxidized, what would it look like?
Bruce Ballantyne: Just rusty.
Peter Bell: Yeah.
Bruce Ballantyne: Just rusty. No malachite, no green, no nothing. Well, we're coming down here now, we're going to show you. So you get an idea of the scale. There she is. A perfect map.
Peter Bell: What's that?
Bruce Ballantyne: Two kilometers. Now, look at this map of CRT-RS and measure in your mind how big this is.
Peter Bell: That's half a kilometer, at least, across.
Bruce Ballantyne: It's not so bad, then, looking at that black wall, is it?
Peter Bell: Well, it's just 500 meters, 600 meters, I was saying ...
Bruce Ballantyne: It's not so bad, looking at our black wall, anymore.
That was refreshing when I saw that. But the more fantastic thing is, okay, so we've got these big babies sitting out there, but in actual fact it's the smaller tourmaline breccias that are in those bodies right there, that I showed you the stockworks for, earlier, where they're getting all of the fingers where they're getting the good stuff. You had both bodies and fingers working in the same system area, in very close proximity to each other.
Bruce Ballantyne: That's the deal in a coffin, as far as I'm concerned.
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This document contains statements that are forward looking statements and are subject to various risks and uncertainties concerning the specific factors disclosed under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Company’s periodic filings with Canadian securities regulators. Such information contained herein represents management’s best judgment as of the date hereof based on information currently available. The Company does not assume the obligation to update any forward-looking statement.
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