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Shares in Barkerville Gold Mines (CVE:BGM) added 8.6% on Tuesday after the company announced the latest set of drill results from its flagship Cariboo project in British Columbia.
On the TSX Venture Exchange BGM exchanged hands for $0.76 a share for a market valuation of $227 million. Barkerville stock is up a spectacular 70% over just the last month on a steady stream of positive news from its massive 1,177 square km Cariboo land position which includes six past producing mines.
The first drilling from the Valley Zone intersected high grade gold mineralization close to the surface and at new depths between the Cow and Island Mountain deposits.
We envision this camp as a 20-year plus asset
According to the junior explorer these results represent the first holes drilled in the Valley Zone area since the Cariboo Gold Quartz Mine ceased operations in the 1960s.
Last week the junior explorer announced permits to begin small-scale underground production at the property’s Bonanza Ledge deposit which it hopes to start up in July and proces at its own mill located 110km south of the property.
Northern Miner’s Lesley Stokes spoke to Chris Lodder, president and CEO of Barkerville, and in the interview posted yesterday he told the paper that “underground mining would be a test for future production at Cow and Island Mountains — the details of which would be outlined in a feasibility study expected in 2018”:
“We’ll start with something small so we can learn how to mine these deposits from underground, and then apply it to the rest of the property,” Lodder says, noting the vein-hosted and replacement-style orogenic gold deposits fall within a 67 km long belt of prospective rocks.
“Anything we build for the long-term will have to be scalable, because we expect to find deposits along the entire length of the mineralized trend .… We envision this camp as a 20-year plus asset,” he adds.
The company has an ongoing 130,000m drilling program at Island Mountain following 60,000m program at Cow Mountain last year.
In March last year Barkerville updated the resource estimate for Cow Mountain outlining indicated resources totalling 2.8 million ounces of gold at an average grade of 2.4 g/t. Inferred resources total 2 million ounces at 2.3 g/t.
Click here for the full Northern Miner interview (paywall).
