Patience, planning key to Vedron’s Timmins strategy

Slowly and methodically, Vedron Gold (VDGI-C) is proceeding with a drill program aimed at expanding the resource of the Fuller gold deposit, about 10 minutes’ drive southeast of town.

Fuller, which produced a small amount of gold when it was developed by Belmoral Mines during the 1980s, is surrounded by some of the storied mines of the Timmins camp; immediately north of the Buffalo Ankerite, northeast of the Aunor and Delnite mines, and south and west of the Paymaster and the Dome, it was mined in the early days from an inclined shaft. Parts were also test-Mined by the Buffalo Ankerite in the 1950s. The scale of the property is modest, at least partly because the landholdings were fragmented during the early years of the Porcupine camp.

The mineralization is hosted mainly in sheared volcanic units that are intruded by a felsic porphyry. The bedding, the shear zones, and the porphyry itself are all roughly parallel, with an eastward strike and a nearly vertical dip. It suggests a consistent pattern of tectonic straightening, but in some zones the elements are oblique to this main structural trend.

Conventionally this has been interpreted as the nose of a fold, but Vedron’s drilling has picked up vertical structures, north of the supposed fold hinge, which suggests the oblique structures are in faulted blocks broken from the main structural trend.

The typical mineralization Vedron has been drilling consists of disseminated pyrite, with occasional specks of visible gold, in chloritic volcanic rocks that have been flooded with silica and carbonate. There is little or no sign of arsenopyrite or of base-Metal sulphides like chalcopyrite. The simple mineralogy of the Contact and HW zones was one of the things the project had going for it in the 1980s: recoveries were in the 90% range using conventional metallurgy.

On The Northern Miner’s recent site visit, Vedron’s consulting geologist, Ken Lapierre, displayed drill cores, plans and sections from a neglected corner of the Timmins camp.

Those used to the impressive quartz-Vein mineralization that other deposits in the Timmins camp boast may go away unimpressed, but the disseminated mineralization is capable of returning powerful grades as well. “It’s there, it’s ugly, and it runs,” said Lapierre, who expects to have a resource figure ready before the summer is out. The calculation will be based on drilling in the deposit’s previously known Contact and HW (Hanging Wall) zones, and on several new zones discovered in the past year.

.SGreen carbonate

Less important to the resource picture at the project, but still interesting from the explorationist’s point of view, are several “green-Carbonate” zones — auriferous quartz-Carbonate-fuchsite rocks which occur mainly in the hanging wall of the deposit. The zones, though narrow, have returned grades around 0.1 oz. per ton, and at other mines in the Abitibi — most notably, Kerr Addison — a similar style of mineralization is capable of hosting high grades.

A new shallow zone, called the ML, appears to offer potential for more mineralization to the west and south. Drills are now concentrating on this area, where the zones appear to strike northeast and dip sub-Vertically.

Vedron’s program has had relatively few dud holes, perhaps indicating that grades are relatively uniform. Experience at the Buffalo Ankerite and, later, at the Fuller decline, also suggests that the true grades can only be estimated from drifting, and typically these turn out to be higher than indicted by the drill holes.

.SHost sequences

The zones drilled to date also correlate well downdip and from one cross-section to the next, and even when they are narrow or low-grade they line up nicely with their better-endowed sisters on the plans and sections.

With all the major mineralized structures — Contact, HW and the F-series — looking much the same, Lapierre has tended to rely on the host sequences, particularly a pillowed volcanic unit, to tell which zone is being intersected.

By far the bulk of the new resource will come from the Contact and HW zones, which provided most of the ore from the Fuller decline. The footwall structures are not correlated well enough yet to allow Lapierre to delineate many believable resource blocks in the F zones.

Still, there is strong evidence that the F zones may offer good potential once there is dense enough drilling to correlate them; when a drift at the 2,500-ft. level from the Buffalo Ankerite shaft reached the area in the 1950s, exploration drill holes intersected gold grades of 0.14 oz. per ton (over 10 ft.) to 0.24 oz. (over 7 ft.) — all far enough into the footwall to suggest the structures that were intersected correlate with the F zones. And certainly the “stacked” structural style common to most gold mines in the Abitibi belt suggests there is potential in the footwall. “I don’t know of one mine in this camp that’s one zone and one resource,” said Lapierre.

Other zones, well to the north of the decline, will ultimately become drill targets once the Fuller structures are better known. A series of induced-polarization anomalies with low resistivity (a sign of silicification) and high chargeability (a sign of disseminated sulphides) are now being stripped and washed.

Lapierre is sold on the stripping technique, which offers excellent structural and stratigraphic information at relatively low cost. He estimates that the project has spent around $75,000 on backhoe time and water washing — about the price of two deep drill holes — and finds the trenches can tell as detailed a story as any dozen drill holes. Vedron will also have the services of Lorne Luhta, who recently retired as the Ontario government’s regional geologist in Timmins, to do detailed mapping on the stripped areas.

But for now, the project will concentrate on expanding the resource near the decline, with the simplest of game plans: to keep moving west and hitting mineralization. “It doesn’t have the sex appeal of some other projects,” said Lapierre, “but at the end of the day there’ll be a resource.”