Prize Mining (PRZ.V) management has presented itself as a textbook model of how a small mining outfit can find, secure, gather, explore, and progress gold properties with its work in BC over the last few months, and today has added to its growing reputation by nailing the historic gold property next door to its Daylight project.
[Prize] is pleased to announce that it has entered into an option agreement to acquire 100% interest in the Toughnut Property, located in south-eastern British Columbia. The Toughnut Property lies contiguous to the west side of Prize’s Daylight Property, where an extensive summer exploration program is about to begin. The 1,010 hectare Toughnut claims strategically cover over 3.5km strike length of the Silver King shear including most of the mineralized land between Prize’s main Starlight-Daylight block and Prize’s Sand block to the northwest.
That’s all well and good, but grabbing a property over the fence is pretty standard news for most mining companies. The important aspect of this comes when you realize the Toughnut claim was wedged between two existing Prize properties the company knows are on the same strike. In other words, they had the edges – now they have the center.
Prize has been crawling all over this property since they hooked into it late last year, dotted as it is with old shafts and historic data and pits and trenches. Check it:
The Toughnut Showing (MF 092FSW294) which includes old pits, shafts and trenches had grab samples from Pacific Sentinel in 1989 that returned 6.64 g/t, 8.65 g/t, and 32.8 g/t Au with associated silver ranging between 33 and 175 g/t Ag. Follow up diamond drilling by Valterra Resource (VQA.V) in 2010 returned a best intercept of 6.9 g/t Au and 143 g/t Ag over 2.0m, and 4.05 g/t Au over 8.0m in hole VTN10-005.
That’s some consistent drill results, being as they happened over 21 years apart. There’s more:
The Gold Eagle Showing (no recorded Minfile) located 500m north of the Toughnut Showing was drilled by US Borax in 1988 who reportedly returned a strongly anomalous intercept of 90 g/t Au over 1.53m (RC hole S88-43) (AR 19503). In 2010 Valterra Resources also drilled the property with its best results being 4.02 g/t Au and 9.52 g/t Ag over 24.33m (inc. 4.0m of 14.47 g/t Au and 3.46 g/t Ag). The zone has been tested to 73m and remains open and along strike and down dip.
. So why did nobody take these results and get a mine up with them? Mostly because the properties were splintered among multiple players, financing became hard to come by, and Valterra, which was all over the shop, ran out of money. They’re currently a $2m market cap placeholder on the exchange, while Apex Resources (APX.V), the company Prize grabbed the earlier assets from, has a market cap somewhere around the value of a small A&W franchise.
It’s only now that precious metals are starting to rev their engines again, and Prize has come in to snare these plays at just the right time.
Now the question remains, will they work it?
Damn right, they will. They’re going to work this property like it spits out dollar bills.
How does one know that? Well, aside from it being a big part of their presentation to investors, look at what they’re actually doing in the c-suite; they’re not building hype. In fact, they recently REDUCED the resource estimate on their Kena Project, to make it more realistic and current, despite the risk the market may react negatively.
Prize Mining’s CEO Feisal Somji commented, “We have been working with the authors of our report to bring the resources estimates set out in the February Report from the previous 2010 CIM Guidelines up to the 2014 CIM Guidelines. As a result of the 2014 changes in the CIM definitions, the Kena Project resource estimate was reclassified as Indicated and Inferred, eliminating the Measured category. This review and related amendments were positive developments and we have now completed related amendment to the resource estimate and we are pleased that the Kena Project remains to be a strong and viable target.”
They continued:
This re-classification resulted in downgrading all of the former measured mineral resources to indicated mineral resources – a lower confidence level resource, and a minor reduction in the amount of both indicated mineral resources and inferred mineral resources as a result of the application of the CIM (2014) guidelines. The mineral resources set out in the Technical Report use a base case cutoff grade of 0.3 grams per tonne (g/T) Au and are now:
Indicated mineral resources of 24,890,000 t at 0.60 g/T Au, for 481,000 oz Au: a 1.5% reduction with no measured mineral resources; and
Inferred mineral resources of 85,790,000 t at 0.48 g/T Au, for 1,318,000 oz Au : a 5% reduction
We’ve all seen resource plays where the execs will do anything short of sprinkle old jewelry into the core holes to juice their data and squeeze an extra few million bucks of inferred ore into the joint (old timers will have seen that and more). This is a company that says, ‘we just bought a boatload of resources, but we don’t think the numbers hold up so strongly and we’d rather be conservative and not bullshit anyone.’
And that’s an attitude you can bank on.
Prize plans to do enough work on their properties that a bulk sample could be run in summer of 2018.
The purpose of the drilling program is twofold. The first priority is to locate and define ore shoots at depth along the main Daylight-Starlight trend beneath known workings and phase II trenches in support of the plan to undertake a bulk sample in 2018. The second priority is to locate and define new mineralized zones along the Great Western and Eastern mineralized trends. This phase of the 2017 program is planned for September 2017.
We’re getting close to September. I own and am holding Prize stock and am damn happy to do so.
— Chris Parry
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