Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Angold Resources (TSX-V: AAU) CEO Adrian Rothwell on Discovery of New Mineralization at Dorado

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president and CEO of Angold Resources, Mr. Adrian Rothwell. Adrian, how are you today?

Adrian Rothwell: Good. Thank you, Gerardo. Doing really well. Thank you.

Gerardo Del Real: Thanks for coming back on. You and I spoke a bit off-air about the opportunity in Angold given the gold space consolidation that frankly has gone on since last August, right? And so, you had some news yesterday that was somewhat technical in nature but very important, I think, for upcoming assays and future exploration programs. Let me read the headline and then I'll allow you to provide a bit of context for me. The headline read, "Angold Discovers New Mineralization at Lajitas South target at the Dorado Project". Of course, in the Maricunga belt of Chile. Now, I would love the context and then we'll get into some of the more technical aspects of the release.

Adrian Rothwell: Sure. Well, as a lot of your viewers probably know, we're drilling right now at Dorado. And the name of the deposit that we're drilling is called Lajitas. We’ve got a number of targets on the Dorado project, so in addition to drilling, we've had some of our exploration geologists running around the property, doing more regional geological testing. So, we recently just overlaid both the Lajitas deposit and the Lajitas South area, which is about a kilometer South. In the bigger picture, it joins the Lajitas area, and we don't know if it's a discrete region or if it's just a continuation of the Lajitas deposit, which would be amazing.

But we've overlain that area with talus fines samples and rock chip sampling. And we also previously had magnetics down on the greater area of Lajitas and Lajitas South as well as hyperspectral work. So that was old news, the hyperspectral and the mag. And we knew that we had a target at Lajitas South and really we didn't know until we got the talus fines and the rock chip samples back from the assay lab. And that's what this news is about. And it's one step closer to drilling and it looks like an extremely good target for us.

Gerardo Del Real: When you talk about a large mineralized system, we're talking this is centered about 1 kilometer Southeast of the current drilling, correct?

Adrian Rothwell: Correct. Yeah. So the mineralized area just at Lajitas is... Or I should say the alteration zone that we are drilling and stepping out with drilling is within about a 6 square kilometer zone area. And this would be additional to that, to the Southeast. And this zones around 1.2 by 2.2 kilometers. This is a large area. I mean, these deposits within an area, say at Caspiche which is about 800 meters, let's call it a kilometer across that has 20 million ounces. So, we have to drill and we have to figure out what we have there.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's go over the, again, context, right? The first hole... You've now drilled 6 holes and the first one of the season returned 302 meters at 0.71 grams per tonne gold. That was from surface. So it's my understanding that you have two rigs turning right now.

Adrian Rothwell: Yeah, that's right. So they're on hole 7 and 8 right now and both of those holes are step outs. The first hole, 302 meters from surface really confirmed what we have here. We followed that up with hole number 2, where we drilled 110 meters at 0.75 grams per tonne. And hole number 3 with 140 meters at 0.82 grams per tonne. And that last hole was open at depth. So that was a partial hole. Actually hole 2 and 3 were both partial holes. And so we've been compiling assays over the last three, four weeks since that news release and should have some news coming out shortly on further holes. Once we get that context. The all important context to what these drill holes really do mean.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. No. It's a puzzle and you kind of answered my next question. I was going to ask you, how has your experience been with the labs? We've all heard, right, some horror stories out of Nevada and other places. And so I'm assuming, it sounds like things are pretty functional there.

Adrian Rothwell: Yeah. Chili is a very functional country and the assay labs are not as bad as those. A lot of those horror stories around Nevada assay labs came from, early Q1 of this year. In Nevada, they are starting to free up a bit, which will be perfect for our timing, for our drilling at Iron Butte in Nevada. But that's a discussion for another day. We are seeing the labs in Chile getting a little longer. We were getting assay lab times of around 10 day turn around. And now we're looking a little longer than that. So we've got around a 20 to 30 day turn around. It's not unmanageable, obviously we'd like to see it moving faster, but it's nothing out of the ordinary.

Gerardo Del Real: Fantastic. Well, it sounds, obviously you have assays coming through. It sounds like you're already planning ahead in Nevada, drilling there. So a lot of news flow coming up. Anything else you'd like to add to that, Adrian?

Adrian Rothwell: No. I mean, really just to keep in touch on what we're doing, check out our website. We try and keep that updated as much as possible. Probably in the second week of May, I'll be uploading a new presentation and that'll give a little more context on what the Lajitas South results mean for us. We're definitely excited.

Gerardo Del Real: I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to having you back on and start putting together the geometry and the dimensions of everything. Which again, like you mentioned, the context is so important, right?

Adrian Rothwell: Absolutely. Thank you, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Thank you, Adrian. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it.

Adrian Rothwell: Cheers.