4M oz. gold at Probe’s Borden Lake

Probe Mines (PRB-V) jumped 17.3%, or 26¢, to $1.76 per share on news its Borden Lake gold project situated about 110 km east of Lake Superior near Chapleau, Ont., contains 4 million oz. gold and nearly 6 million oz. silver.

Indicated resources at the Borden Lake gold zone stand at 11.6 million tonnes averaging 0.8 gram gold per tonne for 305,000 oz. gold, with inferred resources adding 169.3 million tonnes at 0.69 gram gold for 3.76 million oz. gold. The deposit remains open in all directions.

It also hosts 323,000 oz. silver in the indicated category and 5.02 million oz. silver in the inferred category, both at an average grade of 0.9 gram silver per tonne.

“It has definitely exceeded our expectations,” David Palmer, Probe’s president, tells The Northern Miner, noting that he had hoped for between 2 and 3 million oz. gold and about 3 million oz. silver.

The resource estimate does not include three satellite gold zones and is based on 78 diamond drill holes that tested the gold horizon along a strike of 1,600 metres and to a vertical depth of about 340 metres at a spacing of between 50 metres and 100 metres. It used a 0.3-gram cut-off grade.

It took Probe Mines about nine months from the start of drilling with two drill rigs to complete the resource estimate.

“The beauty of Borden Lake is that no one has ever explored there before, so we have a blank canvas and a lot of upside on the exploration,” Palmer says. “It’s a pretty important discovery for Ontario, too, because it’s brand new.”

Palmer adds that Borden Lake was a neglected section of Temiskaming-aged sediments. “It was overlooked, and we were lucky enough to see the potential in it and give it a shot.” 

Probe describes Borden Lake as characterized by a volcano-meta-sedimentary horizon containing a thick, continuous and consistent zone of gold-bearing disseminated sulphide mineralization.

Palmer says the next steps are to upgrade the inferred resources into indicated and hopefully measured categories, and to expand mineralization and increase the resource. The company is also running metallurgical studies.

“We’ve set a relatively quick pace in terms of what we want to accomplish this year. Hopefully, if all goes well, we can start looking at a preliminary economic assessment,” he says.

In addition to Borden Lake, Probe owns 875 claims covering about 140 sq. km in the McFauld’s Lake area in Ontario’s James Bay Lowlands, including a 100% interest in the Black Creek chromite deposit.

It is also exploring its Cree Lake gold project in the Swayze Belt west of Timmins, Ont., under an option from Mantis Mineral (MYC-C), has a 5% net smelter return royalty on a portion of Agnico-Eagle Mines‘ (AEM-T, AEM-N) Goldex gold mine near Val-d’Or, Que., and a 45% interest in a joint-venture property with Lake Shore Gold (LSG-T), which surrounds Lake Shore’s Timmins mine project.

“We’ve got a lot of good projects on the go,” Palmer says, noting that the company was drilling Black Creek and Borden Lake at the same time.

(Black Creek’s 10 million tonnes of high-grade chromite mineralization are sandwiched between the chromite deposits of Cliffs Natural Resources [CLF-N]). 

“We didn’t know (at the time) Borden was going to do what it did,” Palmer says. “To a certain extent it came out of left field for us. We always thought there was potential there, but we didn’t realize it would be that much potential.”