New discovery for San Anton silver-gold property

Although water prevented San Anton Resources (SNN-V) from reaching the Carmen vein system while drilling its first regional target on its Mexico silver-gold property, the company was satisfied with the drill results.

One of the best results for the Empilazada target was 3.1 metres grading 200 grams silver per tonne and 1.05 grams gold.

Empilazada is 2 km west of the main Cerro del Gallo deposit on the San Anton property in Guanajuato State, 270 km northwest of Mexico City.

The grades came from four holes totaling 745 metres of reverse circulation drilling at Empilazada.

Empalizada is one of more than 25 regional targets on the 200-sq.-km property. Its located along the 3-km Carmen-Providencia vein system and is 2 km west of Cerro del Gallo.Cerro de Gallo has an estimated resource of 4 million oz. gold, 171 million oz. silver and 448,000 tonnes of copper.

The goal was to intersect the Carmen vein system but the drillers were forced to stop short when they hit a fault zone.

There was just too much water coming into the hole so we had to stop drilling, says Gregory Bowes, San Anton president and CEO.

The company will use a bigger capacity drill rig with a larger compressor to avoid this problem in future drilling.

Otherwise well drill it using a core rig, Bowes says.

Based on the first set of results, Bowes says the Carmen-Providencia vein system may be up to 100 metres in width with rock textures that suggest its at the upper levels of a large hydrothermal system.

San Anton is awaiting drill results from two other targets, one 2 km southwest of Cerro del Gallo and the other 1.5 km to the northeast. The company will soon receive geochemical sampling from a target 5 km south of the main deposit.

Since the company acquired the 51% joint venture with Goldcorp (G-T, GG-N) (49%) for the property in 2004, all drilling has been purely focused on Cerro del Gallo, until now.

Its a big property were looking for other discoveries on the property, Bowes says.

Although Cerro del Gallo is an intrusive system, Emplizada is an epithermal vein system.

Even still, 40,000 metres of this years planned 50,000-metre drill program will be done at Cerro del Gallo. The company is trying to boost the latest resource estimate which came out in March.

The question is how much bigger can we make it, Bowes says.

The deposit is open in a number of directions.

The resource estimate was prepared assuming bulk mining and both conventional flotation leaching at a 0.3 gram gold cut off grade and carbon-in-leach using a 0.4 gram per tonne gold-only cut off grade.

The property is located in the San Anton mining district, where locals say mining dates back to the 1700s. No production records exist, though shafts, adits, pits and other superficial workings remain along the three main structural trends near Cerro del Gallo.

San Anton shares rose about 7% in Toronto today to $1.68 a piece on a trading volume of about 107,000 shares.