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Kenrich-Eskay Starts To Dream Of Major Success, Courtesy Of Barrick Gold And St Andrew Goldfields
May 21, 2008
By Charles Wyatt
minesite.com
Wally Boguski may well have pulled off the deal of his life, but he’ll need a few more weeks until he is quite sure. He’s done some good ones in his time, but the acquisition of an 80 per cent interest in a great swathe of land around his company’s existing land position in the Eskay Creek area of British Columbia must come very close to the top of the list. With a signature on a bit of paper and some financial and exploration commitments he has just about quadrupled the Kenrich-Eskay acreage to 115,000 acres. And this is not out in moose pasture. It joins two important properties in the Eskay Creek camp into a single block, which abuts Barrick Gold’s high grade gold-silver Eskay Creek mine property. This mine produced 68,000 ounces of gold in 2007, and mining finished in March of this year. Processing of stockpiled ore is expected to continue for a short time, at which point the mine will be closed and reclaimed.
That’s what Barrick says, but Wally, and his new friends at St Andrew Goldfields from whom he is buying the property, may have other ideas. Compared to smaller companies, multi-nationals march to a different tune, otherwise Barrick would surely have acquired all this acreage for itself, and built up resources so that Eskay Creek became a mine sufficiently large to have an impact on group production. In fact Barrick ended up with just four kilometres of the Eskay Rift belt, compared with the 28 kilometres now under the control of Kenrich-Eskay Mining. A portion of the newly acquired property actually lies within one kilometre of the Eskay deposit, so whatever Barrick may say, it appears to have neglected the old mining rule of consolidating as much land as possible around a mine as early as possible.
From a geological aspect this new property covers extensive areas of the highly prospective Hazelton and Stuhini Group geological units and similar rock formations, which host not only the Eskay Creek mine, but also the nearby Kerr-Mitchell-Sulphurets copper-gold deposits of Seabridge Gold, and the Snowfield gold deposit of Silver Standard. The SIB claim block, which abuts the southern end of the Barrick property, contains a continuous succession of Eskay Rift rhyolite and mudstone, the host units of the Eskay deposits. Furthermore, drilling by past operators led to the discovery of the Lulu zone, a gold, silver, and base metal-enriched zone of stringer and semi-massive sulphides with the same geochemical and geological characteristics as the Eskay deposit.
Wally and his men can now explore the whole of the Eskay Rift belt, and will be able to apply the expertise gained from detailed surveys carried out recently on the company’s original Eskay Creek property, Corey. The data contributed by St Andrew will also be examined and interpreted, and exploration will take place on it at the same time as the ongoing programme at Corey. Prior to this deal, Kenrich -Eskay was proposing to continue with the systematic exploration at Corey, focused on exploring the large volcanic-sedimentary rift basin of the same age and setting as the Eskay Creek mine.
A number of discoveries of volcanogenic sulphides have been made on Corey, demonstrating that the Eskay Rift sequence is highly prospective south of Barrick’s mine. It runs in a north-south direction, and the outcrop pattern of its lithologies is roughly confined to two belts, Unuk and Mandy. The primary focus for drilling this year will therefore be on the Mandy creek area, where some interesting intersections have been reported. However, everything is now being reassessed following the property deal. Wally also has two other bits of good news. First, there is a big tonnage of tailings at Eskay Creek which might be worth exploiting. Second, Seabridge has asked to build a road right through Kenrich-Eskay’s property leading from Eskay to its copper-gold deposits.
Wally is a wiley old bird, however, and does not want to show too much interest in the plant left behind by Barrick at this stage. The major will not dismantle it without him knowing and in the meantime he’s looking for a joint venture partner for his Coastal Copper property, also in the north of British Columbia, which consists of an extensive land package comprising more than 6,250 hectares of mining claims, and completely encircles two of the region's former producing copper mines. The former producers are not included in this package, but the prospective volcanic-sedimentary strata that host the massive sulphide geology are extensively exposed on the Coastal Copper land.
The Kenrich-Eskay exploration team led by Paul McGuigan knows a lot about VMS deposits. Paul’s been working in the area since 1979, specialising in VMS deposits as well as in epithermal gold, IOCG and porphyry copper-gold deposits. It is interesting, therefore, to hear a rumour that Kenrich-Eskay has acquired another highly prospective copper project down in the south of BC on flat land, and where exploration can be carried out year round. Nothing has yet been announced, but Wally is on a bit of a roll at the moment so it should be worth a minute or two of any investor’s time when the news breaks.
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