International Tower Hill hits infill high-grade at Livengood

Vancouver – Winter infill drilling has returned strong gold intercepts at International Tower Hill Mines‘ (ITH-T, THM-X) Livengood project in Alaska.

The company designed the 7-rig 2011 winter drill program to further confirm grade and continuity of the existing zones and also to explore below the existing resource. So far Tower Hill has released 43 holes from the winter program while it expects to release results from the deeper holes in late May.

In the latest results, hole RC-504 hit 33.5 metres grading 8.07 grams gold per tonne from 81 metres depth and hole RC-485 cut 93 metres averaging 1.24 grams gold from 178 metres. Both holes were drilled on the Core zone, with hole 504 pushing the known high-grade zone further west. The company is exploring the area as a possible high-grade starter pit, leading to a larger open pit encompassing more of the deposit later.

Tower Hill drilled a number of holes on the edge of the Southwest zone and reports that it appears to be defining a limit to the shallow oxide zone in the area. Hole 494 cut 4.6 metres averaging 4.03 grams gold from 95 metres depth and hole 506 returned 21.3 metres averaging 1.25 grams gold from 303 metres, while most other holes in the area returned short intercepts grading under a gram gold.

On the Sunshine zone, sitting in the northeast portion of the resource, hole RC-495 hit 41.2 metres carrying 0.64 gram gold from 31 metres depth, hole RC-496 returned 16.8 metres averaging 1.61 grams gold from 108 metres down and hole RC-509 cut 83.8 metres carrying 0.84 gram gold from 168 metres downhole.

In February the company reported the results from hole RC-470 that hit 13.7 metres averaging 5.45 grams gold from a depth of 395 metres, motivating further deep exploration. The company targeted 500-metre deep core holes in the deep drilling.

Extensive infill drilling allowed the company to upgrade over 50% of its resource to the measured category in a recent update, though the overall resource actually decreased slightly. The Livengood project, using a 0.5-gram gold cutoff, now hosts 277 million measured tonnes grading 0.83 gram gold and 120 million indicated tonnes grading 0.83 gram gold for 10.6 million contained gold oz. in the measured and indicated categories. The inferred resource, with the same cut-off, has 104 million tonnes grading 0.79 gram gold for a further 2.7 million contained oz.

The company is working on a prefeasibility study for Livengood to follow up on a preliminary economic assessment released last summer. In the PEA Tower Hill contemplated a heap-leach-only operation as well as starting with heap leaching then transitioning to mill and flotation facilities at different scales.  

AngloGold Ashanti (AU-N) exercised its right to maintain a roughly 11.5% equity interest in Tower Hill by buying 230,764 shares in February at $8.13 a piece.

The Livengood project lies 110 road km north of Fairbanks, Alaska, along the paved Elliot Highway and 80 km north of the power grid. Tower Hill owns 100% of the 145-sq.-km land package, which consists of fee land leased from the Alaska Mental Health Trust, several smaller private mineral leases, and 115 Alaska state mining claims.

Tower Hill’s share price was down 16¢ to $8.44 on a generally bad day for markets. The company has 86.3 million shares outstanding.