RE: Precious Metals Presentation RockFinder, thanks so much for posting a link to this video. Very timely and informative. For those who haven't had a chance to watch the video yet, Drechsler is going through SMD's corporate presentation, and he makes these remarks during the segment from 5:50 to 8:20:
One of the issues that we've had is that we're a little lower lying in terms of geomorphology, we've got low rolling hills with heavier vegetative cover, so we've been relying heavily on geochemistry to target our drilling. In doing so, here's some drill core from our Crag East target where we've intersected large intervals with screaming pathfinder elements - we've got over 1% arsenic and 5700 ppb mercury in this 60 meter intersect. What we see here are strongly altered limestones. When the geologists saw this core last year they were jumping up and down giving hi-5's, they thought they'd made a discovery. Unfortunately there wasn't any significant gold associated with this but we are not discouraged by this.
Here's a zoom in on the Crag East property, you can see the scale of these geochem anomalies, multi kilometer and open ended. As I said, this is in an area of low lying topography with heavy vegetative cover so we've had a number of geologists out on the ground digging around through the trees and trying to get more detailed mapping done.
We've targetted a number of drill holes this year with the aid of some LiDAR surveys that we had done to help target some structure in coincident with geochem. Currently we have another 6 holes awaiting assay from our drilling from this zone from this year. We've yet to tag into a high grade intercept but as I said we're not discouraged because of the scale of these anomalies and the proximity we are to the ATAC deposits.
Here's an example of how this arsenic can occur in the Carlin Trend, it's a cross section from the Deep Star deposit and as you can see if we were drilling up in here we're getting these percent range arsenics with no gold. So, we have the signature for these Carlin deposits, we have the large geochem anomalies, we have the right rocks, so our way of thinking is that it may just be a matter of time, all the advice we've been given is to keep on drilling, it's one of those things where structure is very important in concentrating a lot of the gold mineralization. As you can see on the ATAC discoveries, much of their higher grade is associated with these anti-clinal fold noses, so identifying structure is going to be an important feature for us moving forward.