The breakthrough discovery at the Wolf Deposit confirms how important it is to hire young talent, give them responsibility, support them and listen closely to their ideas.
At Dolly Varden Silver, we have a strong technical team which includes senior geologists who cut their teeth at Newmont and Hecla.
We also have a pool of younger talent that includes a geologist named Amanda Bennett. In fact, she is the youngest member of our team.
Amanda has two degrees, one in Biology focusing on Environmental Studies and another degree in Geology focusing on soft rock and hydrology. She rose up quickly through the ranks at Hudbay Minerals and White Gold.
When Amanda joined us in March of 2021, she was a 29-year-old Project Manager, solving problems in the field. It was obvious she was talented and hungry. I told her “If you see anything of geological interest, come to us with a proposal, if we like it, we’ll designated some meters to test your theory.”
At Dolly Varden, we have archival drill data that goes all the way back to 1910. Amanda started meticulously reviewing the old data, converting some of it from a mine grids into UTM coordinates, and generating 3D models from that.
Amanda zeroed in on the Wolf Deposit as an area of interest. Our VP of Exploration Rob Van Egmond looked her model, and said “Let’s give it a try”.
In December, 2021 we released the first results from Amanda’s Wolf program. We hit 1,532 g/t Ag over 1.22m core length within a brecciated sulphide-rich quartz vein hosted within a broader pyrite stockwork breccia zone of 17.50m averaging 214 g/t Ag.
This helped us prioritize connecting our historic mines and the deposits of the Dolly Varden Trend with the deposits at Homestake 5.4km to the northwest along the Kitsault Valley Trend.
Wolf is now an important area of focus.
In 2022 we intersected 19.85m (13.90m true width) averaging 584 g/t Ag and 412 g/t Ag over 12.80 meters.
In 2023 we hit 15.94 meters (8.77 meters estimated true width) of 1,499 g/t including coarse, native silver mineralization returning 23,997 g/t Ag.
The silver-rich mineralization hosted by the Wolf vein continues to depth and remains open for expansion to the southwest under the sedimentary cover rocks.