When mining companies go prospecting for precious metals it takes years of exploration to determine whether the stake they have claimed has sufficient mineralization to justify building a mine.
Drilling through solid rock hundreds of metres deep is a costly process and it can take a week or more just to drill one hole.
Even then, after a core sample is obtained, it takes several more months to wait for an assay lab to analyze it and determine what minerals the core contains and in what quantities.
For several years, Vancouver-based NorthWest Copper has focused its energy and resources on its claims in three areas roughly 300 kilometres northwest of Prince George. Drilling resumed this year at the company’s Kwanika/Stardust, Lorraine and East Niv sites and geologists were also focused on what lies on the surface.
Last week NorthWest revealed it has discovered a very large footprint of high-grade copper at the surface at its 43,000-hectare East Niv exploration site.
“What we’ve found is we have a lot of high-grade copper at the surface over a very big area,” said NorthWest Copper president/CEO Peter Bell.
“It’s huge, we’re talking five kilometres by 10 kilometres, and that’s a lot of area to cover. What we didn’t know prior to doing this work was that we had such a big area that might have a lot of copper. The excitement for us is we’ve got a huge area with exceptionally good surfacer results we didn’t know about before and that sets us up for future targeting.”
Out of 206 surface rock samples sent for analysis, 48 revealed a copper grade of .10 per cent per tonne, 36 samples had values greater than .25 per cent and 11 showed concentrations greater than 1.0 per cent.
In addition, 11 samples showed copper mineralization of between 1.08 per cent and 6.55 per cent. Those widespread samples, either soil or rock, also contained strongly elevated silver concentrations of between 3.7 grams per tonne and 262 g/t. Trace amounts of gold were also found in the rock chip surface samples.
Most of the samples were obtained along ridges in the southern half of the East Niv property, close to where eight drill holes wee completed this year. East Niv was a new copper-gold discovery in 2021 and in that year the company drilled 10 holes in the area. East Niv lies in the same corridor as the Kemess Underground Project being developed by Centerra Gold.
While the surface results are encouraging, Bell will have to contain his optimism until he sees underground deposits of similar concentrations.
“We’re trying to explore a big piece of land and drilling is the most expensive thing we do, so you want to minimize the drilling before you’ve done a bunch of other work because you want to put the holes in the right place,” said Bell “So we do a lot of surface work in advance of doing the drilling and that’s what we’ve been doing this year.
“There’s copper mineralization poking out of the ground, which is pretty interesting. Most deposits people find are buried. To see stuff sticking out of the ground is pretty unique.”
In total, NorthWest drilled 55 holes in the area this year and has received test results from 15 of them, all from Kwanika North, which revealed high-grade copper and gold mineralization, with much of it close to the surface.
NorthWest is still awaiting test results from Kwanika/Stardust South and the Lorraine Project, 40 km north of Kwanika. The 56,000-hectare Lorraine site was also explored by Teck Resources in 2009 and historic drilling samples date back to 1949. Similar to test results from Kwanika/Stardust, mineralization in the Lorraine from samples obtained in late June contained roughly two-thirds copper and one-third gold.
On the open market in U.S. dollars, copper is selling for $3.85 per pound. Silver is worth about $24 per troy ounce and gold is selling for $1,820 per ounce.
Bell said he won’t know where the company will be drilling next year until it has obtained all of the sample results, and those reports are coming back slower than he anticipated.
