Mega Precious Metals Inc MPRXF

Northern Miner: Mega Precious Metals Inc. goes monumental

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https://www.northernminer.com/news/site-visit-mega-precious-goes-monumental/1003049242/

MONUMENT BAY, MANITOBA — Make no mistake about it, Mega Precious Metals’ (TSXV: MGP) Monument Bay project is a serious gold play. With 3.6 million global ounces of gold already outlined, this property in northeastern Manitoba has the chops to hang with the big boys on the basis of the yellow metal alone.

But Monument Bay is setting itself apart from the pack with a metal known more for hardening steel than protecting against the fall of fiat currencies.

In mid-2012 Mega made an unlikely discovery: leftover core from past operators Noranda and Bema Gold held a valuable metal that no one had previously thought to test for.

“When we got in a room together and turned the lights off and shined the UV light on the core, it was a ‘wow’ moment. I was blown away,” Mega’s president and CEO Glen Kuntz says. “I’ve seen tungsten in little veinlets before, but I’ve never seen it in veins.”

Since that fateful day, Mega has been busy re-assaying 130,000 metres of core for more of the metal. It’s no small task, considering Mega had already been assaying the vast stores of historic core on-site, along with its own freshly drilled material for gold.

But the extra work has been paying off, as Mega estimates that adding tungsten will increase the gold equivalent grade for the project by 20–30%. But the specifics won’t be known until a preliminary economic assessment is ready in the fourth quarter.

“It completely changes the economics of the project,” says Ryus St. Pierre, Mega’s senior project geologist. “For a deposit of 3.6 million global oz. gold, another 30% is 1 million equivalent oz. gold. That’s huge.”

The tungsten had been hiding all those years in scheelite veins within the gold-mineralized footprint. St. Pierre says that its greyish color — as opposed to the common pinkish–orange — blended it with the vein’s other minerals, camouflaging if from past operators.

It took the fresh eyes of a master’s student — whose studies are being funded by Mega — to help uncover it.

“I came up here in 2011 to get my head in the game and see what was going on,” St. Pierre says. “I took samples and looked at it under the microscope. There was a mineral I didn’t recognize, so I went through textbooks and I realized, OK, it was scheelite. Then I got a UV light, shined it on the samples and started seeing that, yes, there was a substantial amount.”

The tungsten discovery punched another hole in a geological model that was lacking in many ways. The model used by all previous operators — which assumes that the property hosted only gold mineralization, and only in shear zones along the edges of a large dyke — had been lacking when Monument discovered that the dyke itself was mineralized, and that mineralization was at more shallow depths than previously thought.

The discovery was a game changer: what was once considered a middle-of-the-road gold project now has a lot of potential, thanks to the dyke that forms most of the property’s main deposit: Twin Lakes. And that was before the tungsten discovery was even made.