Jasper raises cash, expands BC land holdings

It’s an eventful time for Calgary-based Jasper Mining (JSP-V, JAMGF-O) — the junior exploration company added to a steady stream of recent news last month by announcing two private placements and the acquisition of four more land tenures.

The private placements — the first of which was announced on Oct. 26 and the second on Oct. 27 — generated roughly $550,000. In total, Jasper has raised roughly $4.3 million in the last eight months.

The newly acquired tenures will effectively bridge together the company’s McFarlane and Lydy properties in southern B.C.

The tenures total 18.85 sq. km and were snapped up after positive geochemical results were found in soil samples. With the new acquisitions, the McFarlane property now totals 28.69 sq. km.

Jasper’s president Gordon Dixon says the property has the potential to be an “excellent (molybdenum) property,” as the area is an extension of the Eagle Plains property. The Sphinx property, located in Eagle Plains, lies northeast of McFarlane, and 14 drill holes there have returned molybdenum mineralization associated with a surface exposure. A subsurface of granitic material has been previously documented on the property, according to a Jasper press release.

“The results at (Eagle Plains) have indicated there very well could be a very large deposit,” Dixon says.

In the same press release, the company says the property holds weakly anomalous molybdenum less than or equal to 2.8 parts per million (ppm) and copper up to 91.2 ppm. Those numbers are based on ICP analysis of about 160 soil samples.

The Lydy property is thought to overlie a blind Cretaceous intrusion and has been the focus of limited surface sampling and a small diamond drill program during the 2005 field season.

But Jasper’s properties aren’t limited to McFarlane and Lydy. On the phone from Calgary, Dixon is optimistic about Jasper’s Vowell Creek and Isintok holdings.

Vowell Creek is home to what Dixon describes as a “significant graphite discovery.” He says if positive assays come back from the recent 8-hole drill project, further drilling will begin next year. Dixon expects results soon.

As for Isintok, Dixon is bullish on the site where Anaconda Copper drilled in the early 1980s. While Anaconda’s results were modest, Dixon is confident that deeper diamond drilling — Anaconda used reverse-circulation drilling to a depth of only 300 ft. — will return significant results.

“We’ll drill Isintok no matter what,” Dixon says.

Drilling was scheduled to begin in early November.

The recent spate of news from Jasper comes after many years of toil. Dixon says it took 20 years to “gather up” the claims in south-central and southeastern B.C. Jasper now has 15 to 16 properties in the area, most around the site of the formerly producing Columbia River mines. Dixon says the long road of making the acquisitions was particularly arduous because of the inefficient bureaucracies of the former B.C. government.

He credits the change in provincial governments with turning the region into a mining-friendly zone — and doing it without making substantive changes to laws. Instead, Dixon says, improvements have been made by streamlining and making permitting processes more efficient.

“If the New Democratic Party had been returned to power nothing would have been done,” Dixon says of the claims he began acquiring just before the NDP was voted out. “It’s a marvelous province to do business in now because the attitude has changed.”