Kootenay Silver Inc has reported that operator Aztec Minerals Corp has drilled the best hole to date in the current program at its Cervantes joint venture (JV) project in Mexico.
The property in Sonora state is a 65/35 joint venture with Aztec, with Kootenay owning the smaller stake.
The first reverse circulation (RC) hole at the California target on the project generated an intercept (starting from 22.9 metres (m) depth) of 88.41m at 1.1 grams per tonne (g/t) gold, revealed Kootenay.
That included an interval of 54.9m at 1.56 g/t of the precious metal and 24.4m at 2.8 g/t gold.
"The current drill program on the Cervantes project is off to a great start with the best hole drilled to date. We are looking forward to the remainder of the drill holes results," said James McDonald, CEO of Kootenay Silver.
READ: Kootenay Silver making good progress with Phase 2 drill program at its Cervantes gold-copper property in Mexico
The Aztec-Kootenay JV has now completed 22 holes of a 25 hole, 5,000m RC program with the main aim to test the open pit, heap leach gold potential of the porphyry oxide cap at California and the potential for deeper copper-gold porphyry sulfide mineralization beneath.
This is the first hole in the California target in the current program and represents a "significant step out" from a previous fence of holes that established a broad area of shallow oxide gold mineralization.
The best hole from that previous fence showed 160m at 0.77 g/t gold 0.13% copper and 3.4 g/t silver.
To-date, every hole drilled at California has hit near surface, oxidized gold mineralization with minor copper oxides, noted Kootenay.
Kootenay Silver is an exploration company actively engaged in the discovery and development of mineral projects in the Sierra Madre Region of Mexico and in British Columbia, Canada.
Contact the writer at giles@proactiveinvestors.com