Provided below is the third part of an in-depth conversation with The Unknown Geologist on the geological model for the one-and-only Goldboro project owned by Anaconda Mining (TSX:ANX).
Unknown Geologist: Looking at that diagram, the whole brown unit will carry some grade but it will be really sweet in that purple area. And you can see that there are over 8 units in that one picture. Each of them will have a high-grade shoot.
Peter Bell: Right
Unknown Geologist: If not two! Many of them have two or more.
The problem is that they're not 100 meters high – they're only 20 meters high and that makes them really hard to hit. At Forest Hill, they mined the Adams Lead or 2A Vein but had never even hit it in drilling. They didn't even know it was there. When they went underground, they didn't know it was there! They went after the 4A, the 4B, and the 5A, which were 20 meters away.
I can still remember when they were blasting on the 125 level. The mine boss said to me, "How'd things look today?" "Good," I said. He said, "Did you see all the gold on the face of the 155 level?" I said, "What are you talking about? We're not going to see any gold..."
Peter Bell: Ha!
Unknown Geologist: Long story short, they didn't even know it was there. It was the best vein that they mined – it went for over a kilometer – but they never hit it with any drilling.
Peter Bell: When you say 20 meters high, do you mean the width perpendicular to the nose of the anticline?
Unknown Geologist: Yes. It’s a pipe like a long cigar.
Peter Bell: That’s why you say that "If you were lucky enough to hit it anywhere, you better follow up on it." Okay.
Unknown Geologist: The holes close to a shoot are probably 3-4 grams, but once you're into it you see hundreds or thousands of grams. That's the tricky part.
The resource estimate used a 2-gram cutoff, so it shows a lot of mineralized material. But it would be nice to see a model with a 10-gram cutoff for each belt. That would really show you where the holes are. It would just jump off the page at you. You're not going to have the very large amounts of tonnage in those shoots, but it can be enough to make it work and when mixed with the lower grade…a nice mine!
Peter Bell: If they did a 10-gram cutoff then it would look like a splotch here and there, right?
Unknown Geologist: Yes, they can only represent the mineralization so far on either side of the drill holes in their block models. That's why I want to see these holes that Anaconda have drilled at Goldboro. Did they understand what I was trying to tell them and what you’ve drawn today? You'd expect to see some pretty spectacular drill results coming out of it, if the ore shoots are continuous. My understanding of all this is based on the Boston-Richardson diagram, which the Anaconda geologists have seen. The Boston-Richardson documented a high-grade shoot on each limb, but we saw a high-grade zone in the ramp beyond what was mined at the Boston-Richardson.
Peter Bell: Fascinating for me to think about how the ramp started to the east of the Boston-Richardson and went through some of the stacked belts below it.
Unknown Geologist: There are a few stories about the ramp, Peter.
My first day at the site, they told me: "The first belt you'll see on the 125 level is a new one that we never knew was there." I just came from two-and-a-half years working underground at Forest Hill so I said, "I'll figure it out." I took the survey plug from underground and measured the angle of the bed, which went right into the Boston-Richardson stope on surface. I said, "That's not a new belt, that's the Boston-Richardson." They said, "No, no." So, we had a bet the first week for $50. I said, "Sure – I’ll bet you $50. I know what I'm talking about when I look at survey stuff." After my findings were sent to head office, I was the Project Geologist the second week.
They were wrong and they realized that their survey was off by 20 meters. All you see on the first crosscut at that 125 level is the nose of the first belt. Just the nose of it. They totally screwed up. Yep. That's it. The crosscut would only show you that. At the 250 level, it's 35 feet wide on one limb!.
Peter Bell: Really?
Unknown Geologist: We drove one hole underneath it on the 125 crosscut. I couldn't believe that there were 6 VG occurrences. It was box after box of quartz below your feet. The quartz is about five feet wide on that level. We drilled underneath that crosscut on the 125 on the ramp and it was the 123 Belt. It was just beautiful and they crosscut it on the 250 level.
Peter Bell: And how does all this fit with these 10-meter intercepts? True widths, mining widths, and all that.
Unknown Geologist: Well, there are so many nuggets but these grades are cut in the resource model. If you had a 100-gram intersection, then it's cut down to 60 grams per tonne I believe. Those take the nugget away on statistical basis. I hope that Anaconda followed-up on their 17-4 hole with the 2,500 gram intersection. They just needed to go 25-meters east or west and expect another high-grade intercept.
Peter Bell: If they had gone 25 meters, it would have been a pretty shallow hole!
Unknown Geologist: Right. So
Anaconda needs money and this 485 grams over 2.6 meters is 15 ounces to the tonne. It's 100 feet down. If you project that at 25-degrees along the belt, then it will hit the surface maybe 20 meters to the west of where they collared that hole. I encouraged them to get a bulldozer, scrape it off, and take 2,500 tonnes of that. They would probably produce more gold than you they would all year long at the Pine Cove Pit if they took a 10,000-tonne sample.
: Even if they only got one ounce per tonne from 2,500 tonnes, that would still be $4 million! It might cost you $0.5 million to process and that would pay for the rest of the drilling on the project. Or don't even bother drilling anymore, just start mining the thing. They can do channel sampling and other things, but the bulk sample is the real test. You're only allowed 10,000 tonnes for a bulk sample in Nova Scotia, so they may want to 2,500 tonnes spread the sample around. They can go to other sites – I can find another spot that has even higher grades than that on surface!
Peter Bell: Really?
Unknown Geologist: Yes, indeed.
Keep in mind that this stuff goes all the way out to Dolliver Mountain. There is another 1,000-gram intersection out by the pipeline out around 8,000 east. I believe it's the hole you’ve circled there.
Peter Bell: That hole is all alone out there.
Unknown Geologist: What were the chances of hitting it?
There was another hole that we drilled that went right down the limb of the anticline. I set it up and said "Let’s check it in the morning." When I came back out the next day, it was box after box of quartz and beautiful-looking argillite. I was confused, but then I looked at the angle of the core and saw that we were about 3 degrees to the core axis so we were drilling right down the belt. We put it on display for a bunch of the Orex management. People came down and looked at it.
That hole was mentioned in one of the technical reports too. Hole 37, I think it was. It was in the West Colebrook area – went right down the limb. They milled it. They took out all the VG and they processed that separately. The rest of the core was 0.35 ounces over 150 feet or something crazy.
Peter Bell: Was that the bull quartz? I read “gold in bull quartz” in one of the reports and was intrigued by that.
Unknown Geologist: Bull quartz is useless, but the best vein that I've ever seen on this whole property is the bull quartz vein on the 125 level. It was just gold and quartz – that’s it. Very weird. It was the 1A vein, just between the Boston Richardson and the first belt. When we hit this quartz vein in drill core it was spectacular. It was only about 28 meters deep and a geologist from the Department of Mines and Energy looked at it. He estimated that it was over 10,000 grams gold per tonne. The core has been logged at 1% gold, but it was never analyzed so it was never included in the resource estimate. Some people say it would probably add about a gram to the final numbers, overall.
Peter Bell: Not if they capped it at 60 grams per tonne!
Unknown Geologist: That’s right, Peter.
I looked at the area where we found it and told Jacques Levesque: "Give me half-a-million dollars for a bulk sample, and I'll give you two and a half million back minimum."
Peter Bell: Literally.
Unknown Geologist: Just do a bulk sample on the thing and tell everybody it's going to be high grade. Don't be afraid of what Goldboro is capable of. If you need to raise some money, then this is a good way to do it. Do the normal channel samples and everything else to tell you what we're expecting from the mill, but as Bob Moriarty says, "The only way to figure this out is to mill it." Every time we milled something, the grade came back higher than the samples.
Peter Bell: That was clear to me after reading the revised resource from 2017.
Unknown Geologist: We did two bulk samples, one on each level in the ramp. They were pretty big, especially the one on the lower level. It was about 6,000 tonnes. I marked an area halfway up the wall one meter wide and I said to the miner, "I want you to go a foot deep in between the one-meter mark, and just a slash all the way across the 40 feet." They popped it all out.
I went down and bagged 150 samples without washing it, so I didn't know what I was grabbing other than the size. It was all roughly the same size pieces of rock. I made 150 bags of samples for atomic absorption assays and we sent them off to the lab. I think it came back at about 2 grams per tonne. I thought that was impossible from what I was seeing in the decline. I saw gold and thought it had to be higher than that. It came back from the mill at 4 grams. Everyone was shocked. Every time we send it to the mill, it was always better grade than the samples.
The nugget effect is a tough problem to have. Novo Resources is having the same issue. It's nice that you've got these nuggets because you mine where you see them. At Forest Hill, we had a visual grade inspection underground: If you saw two match heads of gold on a face that was 1.8 meters high, then you had six grams per tonne and it was ore.
Peter Bell: Good lord.
Unknown Geologist: That was our visual grade calculation. So sometimes you'd see hundreds of match heads of gold!
Peter Bell: Since we’re talking blue sky, I will mention the narrow vein mining techniques. If they could figure that out for Goldboro, then it would the world would take notice.
Unknown Geologist: Yes. There are so many applications for licensing that technology. It could be a game changer for Anaconda, not only for Goldboro but tin and silver in Nova Scotia and beyond. Goldboro would be a good test case for it, though, because these ore shoots are pretty continuous.
Peter Bell: And one final question to clarify about the dimensions. I'm pretty clear on the angle, the dip, and then the orientation with regards to the anticline or saddle, but I wonder about the veins themselves. I think I heard you say that some are 30 centimeters thick – is that typical?
Unknown Geologist: At Forest Hill, we mined one quartz vein that was 3.5 centimeters thick.
We had to blast at 1.8 meters to get that vein out, so it is another perfect example of potential for narrow vein technology.
The veins at West Goldbrook in Goldboro are generally narrower, but there's some pretty thick zones with grades around 400+ grams over 2.6 meters. That's a pretty good thickness for Nova Scotia. The Boston-Richardson itself was over 8 meters. The 123 Belt on the 125 level is 13 meters thick on one limb! I've never ever seen that anywhere else in the province.
Atlantic Gold are doing the bulk mining of many narrow veins in a tight package that is 100 meters wide. They're able to pop all that out economically because of the concentrations of those narrow veins in a narrow width. We don’t have that at Goldboro.
The high-grade intersections Anaconda has made at Goldboro may be quartz vein that are only 20-30 centimeters thick. Generally there are several of these veins in a thicker belts of argillite which also carry gold. The veins are small, but they have VG in them and when packaged up as an argillite belt, you can selectively mine that, then giddy up!
Peter Bell: And when you say Boston-Richardson Belt was 10 meters, is that a single quartz vein or what?
Unknown Geologist: It was a quartz belt, but was very irregular quartz with lots of argillite. It was just a really, messy, ugly, bizarre looking quartz veins. The more bizzare-looking it is, the more likely you're in one of those ore shoots or dilation zones. When it looks all nice and uniform, you're not really in a zone to be mined.
You need the dilation zones to open things up. That's where the quartz floods in and you get these really wide, thick zones. Down the limb, it generally narrows out. I remember seeing the Boston-Richardson on the 400 foot level when I worked there and it was unbelievable. It was 28 feet or 8.3 meters thick. I had never seen anything in the province that thick. The mineralization in the Boston Richardson belt at the 250 level on the ramp was only 1.5 meters wide, which is still quite wide.
The Boston-Richardson vein itself was just a quartz vein parallel to the bedding. It looks normal – not broken up or cracked. It looks nice and uniform, but you keep going up the limb and you get into the flexure zones where these ore shoots occur and that's when it just balloons right up in thickness and grade. It is a dilation zone where it's been chewed up and all the liquid flooded into that open space when it was forming years ago.
The difficult thing about Goldboro is that there are so many high-grade targets and the height of them makes it difficult to find them. With all the historical information Anaconda has now, they can really learn a lot quickly. I basically told them where they should look and that they should chase these things up and down dip. Those thousand-gram intersections are your targets – try to figure the up and down dip continuity of those, and you'll see your mine come together. The shoots aren’t big but they're continuous and they go for a long way. It will be interesting to see if they can start to figure out how many tonnes they have in the ore shoots.
Peter Bell: And when you hit one of these shoots, don't give up on it.
Unknown Geologist: That's what they never did at Forest Hill, when we hit high-grade gold with 6-10 grams in drill core, we moved the drill 25 meters east or west of that hole. We didn't care about anything else but that next intersection up and down dip to get some continuity. That was never done in Goldboro….yet…
The only reason I'm still here is that I've seen how successful some of the other places in the province have been with deposits that were peanuts compared to Goldboro in terms of the thicknesses and intersections from the drilling. I've logged 20 miles of core in Nova Scotia, 5 of which was in Goldboro, and I have a good visually understanding of what it takes to make a mine. From what I’ve seen at Goldboro, there's nothing even close to it in the province. Forest Hill had six veins on one limb. We have maybe +30 at Goldboro. On both limbs!
Nova Scotia gold has these ore shoots that are in Caribou and Mount Uniacke and Forest Hill. Chances are, they're at Goldboro as well. If we can drill it properly to figure all that out, then you're going to be laughing.
I want to see if they are trying to apply the theory that I have tried to instill in them. That crazy hole they drilled way out on the limb showed some other gold that I wouldn't have expected to see that far out.
Peter Bell: What a hail Mary, eh? And they indicated 4 VG hits.
Unknown Geologist: Those flexures can be way the heck out there. Why not?
Peter Bell: Just imagine if those run from surface all the way down to 400-odd meters. There’s your tonnage!
Unknown Geologist: All the high-grade will come to surface somewhere, Peter. At least, it should. Once you figure out the three dimensions from the Boston-Richardson mine plan, they can start to pick away at this and show if that high-grade does come to surface.
Peter Bell: Wild. Interesting that the hole 17-06 was close to the guts of the old workings.
Unknown Geologist: Certainly is. Hopefully we'll see some amazing numbers in the next release. It'd be interesting to see what they do with the PEA, as well. That has been delayed and they may be going to re-do some of the numbers there too.
Please note that The Unknown Geologist, Mr. David Hatchette is affiliated with the company but he does not represent the company.
