Atlantic Report Exploration disappointing in N.B.

Consulting geologist Peter M. Dimmell, president of the New Brunswic k Prospectors and Developers Association, is disappointed with the current state of minerals exploration in that province.

“If it weren’t for Brunswick Mining and Smelting, Noranda Exploration and Lacana Mining and its partners, there would be very little exploration going on in the northern part of N.B.,” Mr Dimmell says.

In the Bathurst camp, only BM &S and Noranda are searching for base metals. The companies have drilled in the Stratmat area north of Heath Steele, hoping to find enough copper and zinc ore to allow reopening of the Heath Steele mine.

Lacana and its partners — Sparton Resources of Toronto, Lynx- Canada Exploration of Montreal and Oakwood Petroleums — are continuing delineation of gold mineralization at the Elmtree deposit near the Alcida area, about 10 miles northwest of Bathurst.

The companies also are studying the California Lake area, about 25 miles southwest of Bathurst, looking for epithermal silver-gold deposits. A grab sample from the California Lake area assayed 56 oz silver per ton. “To illustrate how rich this is, 30 oz of silver per ton is the equivalent of 0.4 oz gold per ton,” Mr Dimmell says.

Northumberland Mines of Toronto is working its Murray Brook gold-silver deposit near Bathurst, continuing preliminary work with a view to starting development work in the spring of 1987. Northumberland hopes to heap leach gold and silver out of the gossans, which a study by Kilborn Ltd., consulting engineers, determined would be feasible.

In southern N.B., Gordex Minerals of Saint John is still heap leaching at its Cape Spencer gold property and has recently added more material to the pile. The company is also continuing exploration on the Cape Spencer property.

Glenvet Resources is diamond drilling two prospects near Saint John, the Millican Lake gold property and the Golden Grove graphite property.

In other N.B. activity, Mispec Resources, owned by Saint John businessman-prospector Harold MacNamara, has been drilling on its claims adjacent to Gordex’s Cape Spencer property.

“But despite all this, exploration in N.B. is down from what it has been in the past few years,” Mr Dimmell says. The N.B. PDA is working with t he provincial government to stimulate investment in minerals exploration in the province.

Incentives should be put in place to make it worthwhile for local investors to invest in their own province, he says. Mr Dimmell believes a lot of N.B. money flows out of the province to fund exploration projects in other parts of Canada, particularly Quebec and Ontario.

Mon-Dor Explorations of Dorval, Que., is using flow-through share funding to drill gold-bearing veins to the south of the Grand Pabos fault zone, about 26 miles north of the village of Paspebiac on the Gaspe Peninsula. The project is being managed by Northwest Exploration Services of Bathurst.

Mon-Dor will spend between $250,000 and $500,000 on the property and anticipates completing 10,000 ft of diamond drilling by year-end to evaluate the potential of the epithermal precious metal veins. Esso Minerals carried out a $500,000 exploration program there during the 1970s. Geologist Dr Raymond A. Marleau is president of the company.