Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Alianza Minerals (TSX-V: ANZ) CEO Jason Weber on Discovery of High-Grade Silver at the Previously Untested Bighorn Zone of the Haldene Property in the Yukon

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Alianza Minerals (TSX-V: ANZ)(OTC: TARSF), Mr. Jason Weber. Jason, how are you this afternoon?

Jason Weber: I'm doing very well, thanks.

Gerardo Del Real: It's good to have you on. You had some important news today. Pretty high-grade hits in veins in drilling at the Bighorn Zone. Let's talk about it. This is kind of a big deal. I know that it's only a couple of holes that we're talking about, but it was, I believe, 3 kilometers away from known mineralization with some absolutely fantastic grades that include 125 grams per tonne of silver, 4.4% lead over 2.35 meters from 154 meters, if I'm correct. And I'm working off of memory here, so please correct me if any of that was incorrect.

Jason Weber: Wow, you're good. That was a good rundown.

Gerardo Del Real: Hey, excellent. Well, thanks for chatting with me, and we'll talk to you another day, Jason.

Jason Weber: Yeah, you bet.

Gerardo Del Real: All jokes aside, Jason, can you please explain to us why these holes were important? I assume – and I'll get to it in a second – but I assume that you have a followup to this because it seems like you have multiple structures to explore and target now.

Jason Weber: Yeah. You mentioned some of it in your intro there. The fact that this is 3 kilometers away from where the main area of work has been at the Haldane property, which is what we call the Haldane Vein System.

That area has been worked for the past hundred years. It goes back to the early 1920s actually where they first discovered silver here. Now, that said, our first hole this year was the 14th hole drilled on surface on the property. So even though there's a hundred years of history there, there hasn't been a lot of work done.

So for us to find this new zone 3 kilometers away, I think really speaks to the potential for the fact that we can find buried veins here that we're not going to see at surface, that the old timers wouldn't necessarily have picked up.

We came into this project with that idea and so to get that result in drilling, to see that at Bighorn and hit, actually, 4 structures down the hole and then the one big one. It was actually a 9-meter structure and within that 2.35 meters ran the 125 grams silver.

So it checks a few different boxes for us. One, we hit a big structure, we want to see big structures. Two, we hit high-grade silver mineralization. We want to see that and having the multiple structures that are going to host veins, we saw that as well. So now it becomes a test of working along these structures to find the high-grade shoots, where you're going to get the thicker veins. That'll be the process going forward on these.

Gerardo Del Real: What kind of timeline do you give that to be able to test this new target properly?

Jason Weber: So that'll be something we'll attack next year, as soon as we can get back in there next year. We'll probably - I'm going to guess without even sort of sitting down and planning this out - but we're probably going to want to go in and do some more groundwork there, just see anything else we can glean from the surface that might help us direct the drilling. Then follow that up with drilling later in the season.

It really depends on what kind of snow year they have, how early we can get in there. But I think this year the crews were in May, so it wasn't the earliest of years. It was probably a little delayed. So maybe a little earlier. Certainly at the Bighorn Zone, we won't have any more results until we get back out on the ground there next year.

Gerardo Del Real: But you did mention that we're still waiting on two holes, correct, if I'm not mistaken?

Jason Weber: Yes, exactly. The two holes remaining were drilled at the Mt. Haldane Vein System, that sort of central area that's been worked over time. We targeted what we call the Middlecoff Zone, where there was some high-grade mineralization that had been sampled and extracted underground We tried to set up. It's kind of a steep hillside there. It's set up as best we could to try to test that along trend and down plunge as well. So two holes on that target that we're still waiting for.

Gerardo Del Real: Can you give us an update on your BP property in Nevada? Because I understand there was a field program here that you conducted recently. Is that correct?

Jason Weber: Yeah, and then just maybe before I do that, if I could just mention the last target that was drilled. It was actually the first drill hole at Haldane, which was the Ross anomaly, which was the soil geochemical anomaly as well that we had identified on surface. And although we didn't hit big, thick veins there, we did see evidence of structures in the overlying rock.

So these rocks aren't as conducive to forming nice, thick veins that we see, say, over at the Bighorn. The bottom of that hole, we hit what we think are the right rocks. So we actually think we were probably higher up in the stratigraphy than we thought. There's not a lot outcrop in this area, so we were just sort of inferring from the surrounding geology. But now it looks like we've got some evidence there that the structures exist. They just don't form nice veins where we hit them.

There still is potentially a target at depth at the Ross anomaly. So I don't want to write that one off. I think that's something that we'll go back and revisit early in the new year as well.

Gerardo Del Real: It should be fairly quick to answer that question whether or not you're in the right rocks down there once you get back in there. Right?

Jason Weber: I hope so. The problem is you have a few square kilometers of treed hillside and you find you meter outcrop scale exposure. So it's very difficult to figure out and you've got some complex faulting in there. We had an interpretation of what the faulting was doing that was obviously incorrect. Based on what we've seen, we have another interpretation now. Hopefully we can go out in the field and, like you say, quickly see whether that interpretation still has the validity or not.

This is often the case with these types of systems with little outcrop. You make a guess based on the information you have, and when you collect more you adjust that interpretation and you keep moving forward.

Gerardo Del Real: That's why they call it exploration.

Jason Weber: Yeah, absolutely. And it is like building a puzzle that a lot of times you don't have the picture of the puzzle you're building ahead of time. So that makes it a little more challenging.

But as far as BP goes in Nevada, we finished up our fieldwork there. I've just started to see sort of a summary of that field program.

And we've been advancing stuff at our a Horsethief project as well. We're probably not going to get in there to drone this year. We've got some really nice targets developed at Horsethief that us and our partner Hochschild are quite eager to get in and drill. That'll be a good program coming up, well, I can't get there soon enough, but it'll be a bit dependent on timing from our partner.

Gerardo Del Real: Sure. Sounds good. Well, Jason, I'm looking forward to having you back on the next bit of news. I know we have assays pending and I get the feeling you're always out there with your finger on the pulse looking for other things as well.

Jason Weber: Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully we'll be talking very soon.

Gerardo Del Real: Fantastic. Thanks again, Jason.

Jason Weber: Thank you