Initial resource for Probe Mines’ Borden Lake

Probe Mines (PRB-V) jumped 26¢ or 17.3% to $1.76 per share on news its Borden Lake gold project near Chapleau, Ontario contains about four million ounces of gold and nearly six million ounces of silver.

Indicated resources at its Borden Lake gold zone contain 11.61 million tonnes averaging 0.8 gram gold per tonne for 305,000 ounces of gold, with inferred resources adding 169.32 million tonnes averaging 0.69 gram gold for 3.76 million ounces of gold.

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

“It’s definitely exceeded our expectations,” Dave Palmer, Probe’s president, told The Northern Miner, noting that he had hoped for between two and three million ounces of gold and about three million ounces of silver. 

The resource estimate did not include three satellite gold zones and was based on 78 diamond drill holes that tested the gold horizon along a strike length of about 1600 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 per tonne 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 deposit remains open in all directions.  

“The beauty of Borden Lake is 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 Timaskamig-aged sediments. “It was overlooked and we were lucky enough to see the potential in it and give it a shot.”

Borden Lake is characterized by a “volcano-/meta-sedimentary horizon containing a thick, continuous and consistent zone of gold-bearing disseminated sulphide mineralization,” Probe states.

Palmer says the next step is 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 and hopefully, if all goes well, we can start looking at maybe an economic assessment,” he says. “The goal is to get us to the point where we can look at a PEA.”

In addition to Borden Lake, it owns 875 claims covering about 14,000 hectares in the McFauld’s Lake area, including a 100% interest in the Black Creek chromite deposit. It is also exploring its Cree Lake gold project in the Swayze Belt of Ontario, under an option from Mantis Mineral Corp., has a 5% net smelter royalty on a portion of Agnico-Eagle Mines (AEM-T, AEM-N) Goldex mine near Val d’Or in Quebec, 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 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 leftfield for us…We always thought there was potential there but we didn’t realize it would be that much potential.”