Cree Lake ‘A Dream Come True’ For Mantis Mineral

Like the chief executives of many junior exploration companies these days, Robin Ross believes there’s a huge disconnect between the amount of gold Mantis Mineral (MYN-C, MNTCF-O) has in the ground and its share price.

At its flagship project — Cree Lake — the Toronto-based company has uncovered high-grade gold of up to 43.2 grams per tonne in a trenching program, 150 metres northeast of Mantis’s high-grade Flint Rock gold occurrence.

In the discovery hole at Flint Rock, drilling returned a weighted average result of 2.05 grams per tonne along a 15.5-metre cored interval in hole CL09-6, including assays as high as 11.55 grams per tonne over 0.8 metre.

“It’s almost like a fairy tale for us at Mantis,” Ross says.

That tale began in 2008 when Mantis stripped, mapped and sampled the Flint Rock gold occurrence on its Cree Lake property in Swayze Twp., in Ontario, 200 km northwest of Sudbury and 125 km southwest of Timmins.

Seventeen percent of the trench samples delivered gold values exceeding 34 grams per tonne, with one sample yielding 1,300 grams per tonne.

The Cree Lake fault is associated with the Ridout deformation zone, a 130-km structure that hosts past-producers such as Augen Gold’s (GLD-V) Jerome mine, about 15 km to the east.

“The grades that we uncovered in our initial discovery hole at Cree Lake are not unlike those initially uncovered by West Timmins Mining and Lake Shore Gold’s Thunder Creek property, where their initial intercepts graded 0.82 gram per tonne over 25.6 metres,” Ross says. “Our plan is to go up this winter and do a follow-up IP survey and drill through the winter and prove that this deposit is as big as we think it is.”

In addition to Cree Lake, Mantis has two other gold projects. Its Orphan gold mine, a past-producer, is about 350 km north of Cree Lake in the Geraldton-Beardmore district and it borders Kodiak Exploration’s (KXL-V, KXLAF-O) Golden Mile discovery to the west. Historically, the Orphan mine averaged 25 grams gold per tonne and 14 grams silver. Mantis has completed a 1,300-metre drill program (eight holes) that have probed the Orphan vein along a 250-metre strike length to a depth of 135 metres and found that it is open along strike and length in all directions.

About 2 km northeast of the Orphan mine and 9 km east of Kodiak’s Golden Mile discovery, is the company’s Foisey project. In its drill program, Mantis got up to 3.2 grams gold per tonne and on-surface channel-cut sampling and grab sampling returned grades as high as 28.8 grams. The deposit is open at depth and along strike. So far drilling has explored to a vertical depth of 75 metres along a 650- metre strike length.

Mantis has about $1 million in the bank and some long-term debt. And with the gold price hovering around US$1,100.00 per oz., Ross believes Mantis is a good buy at 5.5¢ a share.

“Because the share price is so low, with the gold market as hot as it is, it’s an opportunity for investors to leverage the bull gold market through an investment in Mantis,” Ross says. “We are under the radar screen (but) the fundamentals should take care of the share price.”

Mantis has a 52-week trading range of 2-15¢ per share with 76 million shares outstanding.