Massive Alberta land position — Lac Minerals pools ground

Major gold producer Lac Minerals (TSE) says it has reached an agreement in principle with Tintina Mines (TSE) and NSR Resources (TSE) to pool land holdings totaling 11,000 sq. miles in the Ft. MacKay area of northeastern Alberta.

Under the direction of Lac, a “major gold exploration program” will be conducted. Already, Lac personnel have collected samples and examined them at the company’s microprobe facilities in Denver, Colo.

“Gold-bearing phases have been observed in some samples,” Lac reports. “Various assay techniques are currently being investigated, along with continuing microanalytical work.”

At the company’s annual meeting, Michael Bates, the president of Lac North America, said: “We’ve undertaken a study over the past several weeks. We’ve taken our own samples and examined them in our lab in Denver. We found microscopic gold.

“We are confident of the validity of what we saw,” he added. Of Lac’s holdings in the Ft. MacKay region, he said, “we are prospectively looking at a large area we believe to be significant.”

Tintina, meanwhile, said in a press release that regulatory approvals were received for its recently announced acquisition of an additional mineral permit adjoining its Ft. MacKay property.

Tintina halted analytical work in December to concentrate on microanalytical and mineralogical investigations. This work is being conducted by the Geological Survey of Canada’s (GSC) Institute of Sedimentary and Petroleum Geology in Calgary, Alta. The microanalytical techniques include laser ablation, a relatively new technique in which lasers vaporize minute quantities of a sample that are then measured for their precious metals content by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (or ICP-MS). Quantitative evaluation by ICP-MS is not uncommon; laser ablation as a sampling technique for precious metals in rock samples, however, is less common.

Partial results of this work will be made public by federal and provincial authorities at Toronto ’94, a conference scheduled for the week of May 2 and sponsored by the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum. (See The Northern Miner’s April 18, 1994, issue for some results of the GSC work.) Attention on the area was prompted last year when Focal Resources (ASE) reported values in the order of 0.41 oz. gold per tonne and 1.99 oz. platinum using unconventional assay techniques.