Oro Gold gains on Mexican results

Vancouver — As share prices tumbled down all around, Oro Gold Resources (OGR-V, OGRSF-o) showed what kind of news it took to simply not lose ground during one of the worst days in the history of the Toronto stock exchanges.

The Vancouver-based junior announced new drilling results from its Trinidad property, located 110 km east of Mazatlan, Mexico. The best result ended: 8.5 grams gold per tonne over 61 metres, from 151 metres depth in hole 12. The lower 41 metres averaged 10.16 grams gold.

The Trinidad property is a district- scale holding, home to at least 10 drill targets. Two of those targets — the old Taunus pit and the small Colinas target a few hundred metres to the southeast — together host an inferred resource of 4.49 million tonnes grading 1.39 grams gold.

A significant portion of that resource is contained in what Oro Gold calls the Resource Expansion zone, a northeast extension of the Taunus pit that is concealed by some 80 metres of cover. One of the main goals of the recently completed 4,000-metre drill program was to grow and upgrade the Expansion zone resource.

Hole 12 was part of that goal, drilled in the centre of the zone. The hole was abandoned 40 metres short of its target depth due to bad ground conditions; the last core interval assayed at 11.3 grams gold.

Another core hole drilled in the Expansion zone also returned promising results: 5.29 grams gold over 23.6 metres, including 15.8 grams gold over 7.3 metres, starting at 147 metres in hole 13. Hole 13 was drilled to twin reverse-circulation (RC) hole 25, which hit 3.3 grams gold over 30 metres. Interestingly, the assay results in core showed a 50% grade increase over the same interval in the RC hole.

“Why is that? No one here knows quite yet,” says Freeman Smith, a consulting geologist with Oro. “The idea of free gold is being discussed, the nugget effect is being discussed, but really we don’t understand it yet.”

Other RC results from the Expansion zone include hole 40, which cut 1.62 grams gold over 100 metres from 166 metres depth, and hole 47B, which returned 5.7 grams gold over 26 metres from 106 metres depth. Hole 37A, punched into a target just south of the old pit, returned 2.51 grams gold over 18 metres from 16 metres depth.

News of the drill results lifted Oro Gold’s share price 9 to 38, on a day when the Venture Exchange lost 166 points or 12.8%. The company has a 52-week trading range of 18-83 and has 25.5 million shares issued.

In other news, Oro recently discovered a new surface showing within the Trinidad property. The San Cristobal surface showing is 10 km southeast of Taunus along the regional, northwest-trending structural corridor that extends diagonally across the property for more than 40 km.

The San Cristobal showing consists of hydrothermal breccias and quartz veining covering some 12 sq. km in the southeast corner of the Trinidad property. The prospects contains four zones: two hydrothermal breccia showings, a quartz veining zone, and a quartz stockwork zone. The company plans to move a drill to San Cristobal in the near future.

And some 20 km northwest of Trinidad, at Oro’s Cimarron project, the first phase of a 2,400-metre RC drill campaign is returning prospective intercepts. Cimarron, which sits 40 km east of Mazatlan, is a joint venture with Mazorro Resources (MZO-v).

Drilling tested the Calerita target, located in the central part of the property and results confirmed the presence of gold in an outcropping zone. Hole 2 returned 0.9 gram gold over 90 metres, hole 1 cut 84 metres averaging 0.6 gram gold, hole 4 hit 0.7 gram gold over 60 metres, and hole 6 returned 0.5 gram gold over 76 metres. All intercepts started at surface.

The Calerita target is centred on a northeast-trending gold-in-soil anomaly hosted by intrusive and volcanic rocks that is 1 km long by 300 metres wide. Drilling to date has delineated a zone 350 by 250 metres, still open along trend and at depth. Before year-end the joint-venture partners plan to complete another 2,500 metres of RC drilling, 300 metres of core drilling, metallurgical test work, and an initial resource estimate.