White Rock Minerals Ltd (ASX:WRM, OTCQX:WRMCF) has notched up further exploration success from ongoing underground diamond drilling at the Morning Star Underground Gold Mine at Woods Point in northeast Victoria, Australia, including 0.25 metres at 972 g/t gold.
The company holds 660 square kilometres of granted exploration licences over the Woods Point-Walhalla Geosyncline between Jamieson and Walhalla, and two granted mining licences covering the Morning Star Gold Mine and the Rose of Denmark prospects.
The area is around 120 kilometres east of Melbourne and close to infrastructure.
Particular success at Gap Zone
The company’s first-pass drilling phase is now complete and there are promising results from the Gap Zone, an underexplored area with 200 metres of vertical extent between areas of historical mining that produced around 883,000 ounces of gold at 26.5 g/t.
This first pass drilling phase of the Gap Zone saw around 5,380 metres in 26 drill holes completed from four drill cuddies located across its 600 metres of horizontal extent.
Two intersections have assayed greater than 700 g/t gold, with assay results still to be received from a further eight holes.
One hole returned 0.25 metres at 972 g/t gold (31 ounces per tonne of gold) in a quartz reef interval with abundant visible gold from the Achilles Reef in the Gap Zone.
Final screen fire assays for a drill hole in the Gap Zone have returned 740 g/t gold over a width of 0.4 metres.
Highlights
Results from the Gap Zone target area include:
- 1-metre at 5.3 g/t gold from 151.5 metres;
- 0.2 metres at 972 g/t from 278.7 metres; and
- 0.3 metres at 5.9 g/t from 253.1 metres.
Drilling continues to return positive grades from the Dickenson South mining area, with results including:
- 0.2 metres at 31.0 g/t gold from 58.1 metres; and
- 3.4 metres at 5.3 g/t from 62.2 metres.
Whitelaw target
Drilling of the Whitelaw target area has also returned positive results, highlighting that the area as a prospective longer-term mining target.
Recent results include 31.9 g/t gold over 1.1 metres.
Drilling targeted the southern extension of mineralisation in a relatively untested region of the reefs to the south of historical mining activities and the results confirmed the prospectivity of the reefs to the south.
White Rock’s recent drilling program has allowed the company to complete a geological structural review of the deposit, highlighting several underexplored zones of prospectivity close to existing mining infrastructure.
The close proximity to infrastructure allows for short to medium-term drill targeting.
Next steps
The company’s immediate objective is a low-capital cost restart of gold production from multiple reef locations at the mine.
White Rock has kicked off interpretation and follow up drill planning in support of the advancing underground development and pre-production activities at the mine.
The existence of an underground mine with infrastructure already in place, including a shaft, headframe and winder, dewatering system and off-shaft development, with a gold processing plant already built, offers the company a quick pathway to gold production.