Legacy Minerals is set to commence a maiden diamond drill campaign at the fancied Mee Mar trend within its Bauloora project in New South Wales, after securing a drill rig and the relevant approvals.
With 15 diamond drill holes approved by the New South Wales Resources Regulator, Legacy Minerals plans to complete an initial six-hole program for approximately 1000m. The campaign is set to begin in January.
Legacy will be following up highly anomalous soil and rock chip sampling across an extensive 2km strike at Mee Mar, with grades up to 55.5 grams per tonne (g/t) gold, 904g/t silver and 1810 parts per million (ppm) antimony.
Legacy Minerals managing director Christopher Byrne said this would be the first time a company has drilled these areas of interest.
“It’s an exciting time to be preparing for our maiden diamond drilling campaign into the Mee Mar trend,” he said. “It’s built upon excellent systematic geophysical and geochemical work completed to date by the exploration team.
“The drilling is testing numerous high conviction targets, under high-grade gold and silver rock chips which exhibit crustiform-colloform quartz vein textures and widespread brecciation.
“Legacy Minerals will be the first company to drill text these newly identified areas of interest, with diamond drilling along strike of significant historical reverse circulation intercepts and down dip of high-grade gold rock chips on surface.
“This is a very important step, as low sulphidation epithermal-style vein systems are primarily structurally controlled, so the delivery of key structure data to help determine the controls to mineralisation early sets us up to plan for optimal drilling orientations.”
This comes after Legacy Minerals recently announced it had identified a series of epithermal gold-silver drill targets at Bauloora following a systematic soil sampling campaign.
Recent soil sampling results have enabled Legacy to map a vast zone of anomalous geochemical prospects coincident with a low sulphidation epithermal-style system, with mineralisation open in all directions.
The company completed a 13km2 geochemical survey at Bauloora consisting of more than 2700 soil samples across newly defined vein trends.
“The purpose of this work was to assist in vectoring in toward potential ore shoots that sit within known mineralised vein trends for future drill testing and to assess the broader tenement area for previously unrecognised anomalies and potential low sulphidation epithermal-style gold-silver bearing veins,” Legacy Minerals said in a statement.
Laboratory assays were analysed for 49 elements, with the soil sampling results delineating extensive gold and silver anomalies, as well as other pathfinder elements such as antimony, arsenic, lead, zinc, copper, molybdenum and bismuth.
Peak soil results included 668 parts per billion gold, 11.2ppm silver, 409ppm arsenic, 299ppm copper, 9.47ppm molybdenum, 1450ppm lead, 75.2ppm antimony, 15.4ppm tungsten and 945ppm zinc.
The results returned 10 areas of anomalous gold-silver and/or pathfinder element associations interpreted to reflect low sulphidation epithermal-style mineralised veins.
“With Legacy Minerals focused on the Bauloora project we continue to rapidly advance the system scale and prospectivity,” Legacy Minerals managing director Christopher Byrne said.
“These soil sampling results add to the growing body of evidence which supports our view of the widespread prospectivity for the Bauloora project to host a significant low sulphidation epithermal-style gold-silver deposit.
“Every phase of exploration work is delivering strong results and strengthens our confidence in these targets and, importantly, has defined a pipeline of high conviction drill-ready targets across the project area.”
The Lachlan Fold Belt where Bauloora is located is home to Newcrest Mining’s 50-million-ounce (Moz) Cadia Ridgeway operation, Evolution Mining’s 15Moz Cowal gold project and the Northparkes copper-gold mine.