Kootenay Silver Inc (TSX-V:KTN) is kicking off a 5,000-meter drill program at its Columba silver project in Mexico which is following up on encouraging drill results from last year.
Drilling at the D-Vein target in 2023 revealed a silver-bearing quartz-calcite-barite vein structure with the highest grades and widths seen to date at the project.
CEO Jim McDonald joined Proactive to discuss the details of the drill program and the D-Vein’s potential to be a major contributor to the company’s first mineral resource estimate for Columba, which it aims to complete by the year-end.
Proactive: You’ve announced that the 2024 drill program for the Columba silver project in Mexico is beginning. It’s going to be an exciting one.
JM: It’s 5,000 meters more here. In the fall, we did 3,000 meters. It’s going to be around 20 more holes and focused on the D-Vein, where we drilled last fall. That’s where we are starting this program here, systemically stepping out along that to start to find out how big this mineralized chute is on the D-Vein.
Could you put this program in perspective in relation to the project so people can understand what you’re looking at here?
What we’re dealing with here is actually an entire vein swarm on the project. It’s emerging as a new vein district, previously unrecognized because it’s not well exposed due to how it’s eroded. Whatever was deposited here is still there. There’s a vein called the F-Vein that was historically mined.
It’s a classic epithermal vein system. What is very common in these systems is you will get one or two or three structures that will carry the vast majority of the ounces that were contained in the district. We want to find those, and the D-Vein looks like it’s probably one of those structures because of the very consistent, good grade hits. We’re excited about defining that particular vein because off of that you can really build a project and a big resource.
How long is it going to take you to drill that 5,000 meters?
It’ll take about three months to drill that, so we should start to see assay results toward the end of April.
Quotes have been edited for clarity and style