KORE Mining finds gold occurrences on California project
KORE Mining (TSXV: KORE) announced Tuesday it has discovered gold in several dry stream beds between the company’s Imperial gold project and Equinox Gold’s (TSX: EQX) Mesquite gold mine, part of its ongoing exploration within the Mesquite-Imperial-Picacho district.
The Imperial project consists of 656 claims covering 5,721 acres in the desert region of southeastern California. The property is located on public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
In the course of collecting samples and mapping the Imperial project area, the company encountered more outcrop than originally anticipated. This indicates that the alluvial cover is shallow in those areas, making a new oxide gold discovery easier and more attractive.
This discovery supports the thesis that fault structures from Mesquite to Imperial have potential to host multiple gold discoveries
KORE also found evidence of historic small-scale mining activities including hand and bulldozer trenches, an exploration shaft and signs of placer mining activity.
The exploration team collected 435 stream bed and rock chip samples over the last three months. Highlight samples so far include 1.4 g/t and 0.5 g/t gold.
This discovery supports the thesis that fault structures from Mesquite to Imperial have the potential to host multiple gold discoveries similar in scale to Mesquite, the company says.
Geophysical interpretation earlier this year had previously defined 19 km of fault structures including the Mesquite East, Ogilby, Imperial East and Imperial West target areas, all of which have potential to host a new gold deposit.
Exploration continues on the east part of the district towards the historic Picacho mine, which is scheduled for completion by January. The company plans to follow up with detailed soil sampling and geophysics to prioritize drill targets in H1 2021 ahead of exploration drilling.
KORE is currently permitting a large 140+ pad drill program via a Plan of Operations (PO) process with the BLM local office. The company had previously planned to permit a smaller program this year using a using a Notice of Intent process, but was required by the BLM to move to the more time intensive PO process that included an associated environmental assessment (EA).
As a result, KORE decided to increase the scale of the proposed drill program adding time to the re-submission. The process has been further impacted by covid-19 and permits are now expected in mid-2021.
Shares of Kore Mining rose 4.5% by 12:30 p.m. EST Tuesday. The Vancouver-based miner has a market capitalization of approximately C$157 million.