Alianza Minerals (TSX-V: ANZ) CEO Jason Weber on Expansion of Claims at Twin Canyon Project, Pending Assays at Horsethief Project & Upcoming Fall Drilling Program at Haldene Project
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?
Jason Weber: I'm doing very well, Gerardo. How about you?
Gerardo Del Real: I'm dong well. It's a busy time. Silver is flirting with $30, gold is flirting with $2,000 again. You have assays pending that I know we'll chat about briefly here in a bit, but you had some news. The last time you and I spoke, we talked about how interesting a project Twin Canyon was. You've now expanded that project. Can we talk about what led to the move and the new position here? Then we'll talk next steps.
Jason Weber: Yeah. If you remember when we acquired the project, one of the key sort of pieces of the puzzle for us was the potential for that mineralization that's been identified at the Charlene Mine, the old adit that the placer miner had been working, we wanted to make sure that was not the extent of the gold mineralization there. While there were some high-grade numbers – 8, 9 grams, multi-gram material recovered from underground – for us the potential really was how big could this be. The stratigraphy that hosts that mineralization, how widespread is that distribution.
So we embarked on a soil geochemical program testing that horizon, and we got gold in soil anomalies where we hoped we would see them. That gave us the confidence to say to ourselves, “This thing could be bigger than, than just the Charlene Mine, and we better tie up some of the high ground that has potential now.”
That led to the staking. That had always been part of the plan. Do these soils, see what we got, see if it is more widespread, stake some more ground. Now we can start to target new areas on the property to test for their gold mineralization.
Gerardo Del Real: For those not familiar, the Charlene Mine was a small underground gold mine. Correct?
Jason Weber: Yeah. A placer miner had been working it, I guess it was mostly sort of in the '80s, but it dates back to the 1950s. I think him and his father had worked on it. A small operation. They would mine a little bit, truck it back to their mill that they had in their backyard. The sandstone that hosts the gold is really friable, it breaks up really easily. They just put it in the back of an old cement truck with some river gravel, turned it, that would crush the sandstone and then they would sluice the gold out of that.
They claim that they were getting multi-gram gold out of what they were mining. It was a neat little operation. We really wanted to make sure that this had potential to be much bigger.
Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. When do you plan on getting the team back in the field?
Jason Weber: Actually, they just came out of the field again. They went back to prospect some of the soil geochem anomalies that we identified and were able to find sandstone that resembled that of the Charlene Mine. This is a bit of an odd project in that the gold mineralization seems to be associated with bitumen, which is thought to be a part of a petroleum system. We were seeing that the sandstone gets a distinctive spotted texture to it, really bleached, and then these black bitumen spots in it. They were seeing that in the vicinity, some of these soil geochem anomalies. That was promising.
The next step for us would be to go back into the Charlene Mine itself and do some detailed work looking at the structural trends that may be exposed underground to identify what might be the controls on the gold mineralization. With that, we would map the structure and then do some detailed sampling, which would then help us when we go to these outboard anomalies we can identify what structural orientation we might be targeting when we test those anomalies.
Gerardo Del Real: Sounds good. I got to ask you about Nevada. Everybody is eagerly anticipating assays. I know it's a busy time for the labs. Can you provide us with a brief update there?
Jason Weber: It's been a long wait here, especially the second batch of results which would be holes 4, 5 and 6 from the Horsethief program. They are still not available. We don't have any results back yet from those holes. Obviously, it's frustrating for us. We had hoped that we would get results back in time to be planning potentially a second phase program, but the way the progress at the lab is going it's making that task a bit difficult. Hoping to have results out in early September here, but it's really out of my hands at this point.
Gerardo Del Real: Well, let's hope it's worth the wait. It's amazing what a discovery of significance does for people's memory as far as assays taking longer than you like, right?
Jason Weber: Yeah, let's hope.
Gerardo Del Real: Sounds good. Jason, anything you'd like to add before I let you go?
Jason Weber: Yeah. We're just in the planning phases of a fall drill program up at Haldene in the Keno Hill District. That would go probably starting sometime in October, which a lot of people might think, “Wow, that's kind of late for the Yukon.” But of course we have good road access into the project. If we pick our the areas we drill, I think we're going to have a good month to 6-week program up there this fall that will get us back into some of the areas like Big Horn and the Middlecoff zone where we had good results last year and we can follow those up with drill tests this year.
Gerardo Del Real: Good stuff, Jason, looking forward to all of that. Thank you.
Jason Weber: Thank you, Gerardo.