Stepout drilling starts at Diablillos

In the northwestern Argentine province of Salta, a 10,000-Metre stepout drill program has begun on the Diablillos gold-silver property of Pacific Rim Mining (PFG-V).

The work, which is being supervised by Barrick Gold (ABX-T), coincides with the completion of eight widely spaced drill holes averaging 250 metres in depth on Pacific Rim’s adjacent, wholly owned Cerro Blanco property.

At Diablillos, two reverse-Circulation rigs and one diamond drill rig are working the Oculto zone. The first will test the northeastern extension of the system on a 100-Metre grid pattern while the second concentrates on eight target areas.

The controlling fault in the Oculto zone continues to the northeast for at least 600 metres.

Pacific Rim believes it can show that high-resistivity anomalies, caused by intense silicification, correlate strongly with the zones of gold mineralization. The geophysical anomalies probably reflect fault zones containing vuggy silica, the alteration type that hosts the mineralization at Oculto and similar gold deposits.