North of 60 Mining News - The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North

Benchmark Metals Inc. March 3 announced plans to explore several precious metal discovery targets across the wider Lawyers property in Northern British Columbia.

A road accessible property about 45 kilometers (28 miles) northwest of the Kemess gold-copper porphyry deposit, Lawyers is home to a small underground mining operation that produced 171,200 ounces of gold and 3.6 million oz of silver over a four-year period beginning in 1989.

Benchmark has identified additional high-grade and bulk tonnage gold-silver targets within the central area of Lawyers trend, a more than 20-kilometer- (12.4 miles) long prospective corridor that runs across the property.

The company sees the potential of building a 5-million-oz gold-equivalent resource in three zones it has identified in the central portion of the Lawyers trend – Cliff Creek, Dukes Ridge-Phoenix, and AGB.

Towards the building of this resource, much of the 87,298 meters of drilling completed last year targeted these zones.

With a resource calculation for Cliff Creek, Dukes Ridge, and AGB expected by the end of March, Benchmark is focusing its attention on drilling six initial high-priority exploration targets – Marmot, Marmot East, Lala, Gifford's Edge, Silver Pond, and M-Grid – and carrying out the geological work on 14 additional targets across the wider Lawyers property.

"Over 60% of the 140-square-kilometer (54 square miles) package remains unexplored and/or underexplored, providing potential for additional discoveries across the plus-20-kilometer-long, mineralized gold-silver system," said Benchmark Metals CEO John Williamson. "Testament to this are the new gold-silver targets that have provided high-grade results at surface and very encouraging drill holes at the Marmot Zone. The new high-priority targets exhibit the same types of alteration and mineralization observed at Cliff Creek, three kilometers to the northwest."

Marmot, a 2,000- by 3,000-meter area where grab samples with up to 61.3 grams per metric ton gold and 3,890 g/t silver have been collected, was the target of five exploration holes drilled by Benchmark last year. One of these holes, 20MLDD005, cut 101 meters averaging 0.55 g/t gold and 21.8 g/t silver, or 0.81 g/t gold-equivalent.

Benchmark says the soil anomaly indicates a mineralized footprint at Marmot that is larger than Cliff Creek, Dukes Ridge, and AGB combined.

Marmot will see drilling to expand gold-silver mineralization across this six-square-kilometer (2.3 square miles) surface expression.

Two other high-priority targets – Lala and Marmot East – lie immediately northwest and southeast of Marmot. Another target – Gifford's Edge – is about 1,000 meters north of Marmot and about 1,700 meters southeast of Dukes Ridge-Phoenix.

The other two priority targets – Silver Pond and M-Grid – are west of the Cliff Creek and Dukes Ridge resource area.

Benchmarks says Silver Pond, a four-square-kilometer (1.5 square miles) alteration zone about 1,500 meters northwest of Cliff Creek, shows large-scale zonation patterns and metal associations indicative of high-sulfidation or porphyry mineralization. Detailed mapping has linked the alteration at Silver Pond to large-scale fault zones that may have provided a conduit for the mineralizing fluids.

The company says a 3D induced polarization geophysical survey correlated exceptionally well with the mapping and was able to image deep in the subsurface to refine drill targets. M-Grid is a strong gold-silver anomaly about 500 meters southeast of Silver Pond.

In addition to these high-priority targets, Benchmark says its surface exploration has 14 large areas of anomalous gold and silver soil anomalies that offer a pipeline of new discovery targets that will be advanced to the drill ready stage this year.

Benchmark Metals Inc.

This includes several new gold and silver soil anomalies north of the Cliff Creek, Dukes Ridge-Phoenix, and AGB resource zones that extend the known Lawyer mineralized trends to the northwest by more than 2,000 meters. With the addition of these new zones, the anomalous gold and silver footprint surrounding the main resource area at Lawyers covers an 8,000- by 7,000-meter area. Benchmark says this suggests a large and robust mineralizing system with significant potential for additional peripheral mineralized prospects, providing more opportunities to discover and drill off shallow resources that could contribute to future resource expansion at the Lawyers gold-silver project.

In addition, multiple new targets are located in the southern extents of the property, roughly 5,000 meters southeast of the Cliff Creek, Dukes Ridge-Phoenix, and AGB zones.

Author Bio

Shane Lasley, Publisher

Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.

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