Copper Lake Resources Ltd (TSX-V:CPL, OTC:WTCZF) has unveiled positive results from a winter diamond drill program at its Marshall Lake copper-zinc-silver volcanogenic massive sulphide (VMS) project in Northwestern Ontario.
Drilling was focused on two new target areas: a prominent magneto-telluric (MT) conductor near high-grade mineralization, and an EM conductor east of the Billiton deposit.
The MT Conductor 1, situated near the Billiton deposit, showed strong alteration and moderate to strong conductivity over a vertical range of approximately 700 meters.
Although no massive sulphides were found, the alteration and mineralization are indicative of a VMS deposit, which Copper Lake believes warrants follow-up drilling.
CEO Terry MacDonald joined Proactive to talk through the results and the next steps for the exploration of the project.
Proactive: Exciting news from the company about your winter diamond drilling program at your Marshall Lake project. Before we get into the results themselves, can you tell me a bit about the project?
Terry MacDonald: We have two properties but we’ve been focusing on Marshall Lake. It’s a large VMS system. The property itself is about 250 square kilometers in size and there’s been multiple occurrence over the project over the last few years. We’ve been focusing on one particular zone, which is referred to as the Billiton deposit.
And that particular zone was part of the winter drill program, right?
Yes. It’s where we’ve been focusing our resources over the last few years. It’s had some of the highest grade intercepts and mineralization that we’ve encountered and it has a historic deposit on it of roughly 2 million tons, but that’s not 43-101 compliant. Needless to say, there’s some really good high-grade intercepts but most of the historic drilling was very shallow. The geophysics we’ve done over the last two to three years has allowed us to see much deeper down to 1,000 meters. So, we’ve detected various conductors and that’s really what we’ve been focusing on.
This past winter during the drill program we were drilling and trying to zero in on where we’re assuming the deposit is. There’s so much high-grade mineralization that there has to be a deposit somewhere. So, we drilled this magnetic conductor and we came back with good results, very strong alteration. In geology, that indicates it’s very close to where a VMS deposit would be. So, it’s really helping us to zero in on where we drill next. After the drilling, we did a borehole probe and that indicated there was an off hole conductor, so that again gives us more information to zero in on for the next drilling.
You’re planning to do that follow-up drilling because as you mentioned there are a lot of questions you still need to answer. Do you know what direction you want to head?
We haven’t designed the specific hole but basically, there’s an about 200 meter gap between two holes that we drilled, that’s about 200 meters in width. It’s open at depth. So, there’s a lot of area in there for a deposit to exist. The next hole will be in that area.
Quotes have been edited for clarity and style