Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Alianza Minerals (TSX-V: ANZ) CEO Jason Weber on Drill Program at the Horsethief Gold Property in Nevada

July 2, 2020

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, happy belated Canada day. How are you? 

Jason Weber: Thanks, Gerardo. I'm doing great. It was a little rainy Canada today on the West Coast, but we'll deal with it.

Gerardo Del Real: Yeah, it happens that way sometimes. I know we talked a little bit off air. Let's talk about the update you put out today. You've completed 1,770 meters of drilling at Horsethief. Obviously, we have a market that is rewarding, not just exploration results, but the market's actually starting to look forward and anticipate results, right? We're seeing that in a lot of names right now. Give us some context on the release, when we can anticipate assays and how drilling has gone thus far. 

Jason Weber: Yeah, I'll touch on the assay part first because I think that's a question I get a lot. With the whole COVID scenario, companies held off work and then everybody started to work at the same time, so the lab's really backed up. 

They've said it's a minimum 4-week turnaround for results. So our first batch of results went in sort of mid-June. So we're looking at mid-July before we should expect results from that. So that's when we'll start seeing the results of those initial holes start coming out. 

Then as far as the program goes, we had it laid out sort of just for ease of logistics. We started in the north part of the property, at the Horsethief North target where the access road enters the property. Started up there, we moved our way south and drilled another 3 holes down at the Horsethief South. Then we start to take off to the northeast, towards our Mustang target, which is a deep IP target that we tested with one hole –  that was the last hole we completed, Hole 6. 

Then the next hole we're set up on is on what we call our Stallion target in the northeast corner of the property. These last two holes, this Hole 6 that we just finished and the next hole are in areas that have never seen any drilling, not even shallow drilling before. So these holes are really exciting for us. It really opens up the property to its potential to host mineralization. We're essentially opening up half the property if we get any results out of these holes. So the last Hole 6 and Hole 7 are going to be a real fun ones for us. 

Gerardo Del Real: How has drilling gone? Obviously you have the 6 holes done, the 1,770 meters. I see that one hole, Hole 5, was terminated at 183 meters. Was that the only one that was difficult, if you want to categorize it as that? 

Jason Weber: No, there was a few spots actually. It's kind of the nature of these rocks, where you get what we call a karst cave development. It's essentially you get some acidic groundwaters often flowing down faults and fractures. Over time they create caves. They just dissolve the limestone, the carbonate rock away and you get a cave. We hit those in a few holes. We were able to persevere through them on the initial ones cause they were vertical holes, so it's much easier to control the drill stem, the rod stem. But on that hole that we lost, Hole 5, because it was a minus 45, the rods just want to fall as they get into the hole and you can't control where the bit contacts the other side of the side of the wall. You could end up shearing off the rod. So it just became too difficult. The void we hit there was over 20 feet wide. 

Gerardo Del Real: Wow.

Jason Weber: So it was a big void. That was a tough one. That was another interesting hole. We sort of targeted that one looking to cross some structure and some trends that we'd seen on surface there, which we kind of accomplished. But it would have been nice to get the last 400 feet of that hole to see what was there. 

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. I understand that the crew has taken a mandated break and will be returning on July the 10th, give or take a day or two?

Jason Weber: Yeah, we're just working on the schedule today actually. Normally, when you do a program like this, at normal times you would just have a new crew come in and take over and the project would continue on seamlessly. But because of the COVID situation, we're trying to minimize the number of people onsite and the interactions with new people. We're keeping the same crew. They all take a break at the same time and then they'll come back to the project together with the usual precautions, as far as safety and isolating and all that stuff. The guys need a break, but we also want to make sure that we're minimizing the chances of somebody on the crew contracting the virus and bringing it into the area that we're working. 

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. You added a new project to the portfolio recently. Any updates there?

Jason Weber: Yeah. We're on the ground. We're doing some, the soil geochemical work that we had identified as sort of the first step to see if that gold mineralization at the Charlene Mine on the Twin Canyon property is potentially more widespread than just the mine workings as we know them. That work follows up on some preliminary work that the vendor had done to sort of prove the concept, this idea that it might be more widespread. So we're targeting the Junction Creek Sandstone, which hosts the gold mineralization, following thatt along strike and doing some soil geochem work just to see if there's other areas, which we suspect there are obviously.

We're starting to see the Junction Creek in outcrop. Other places, we hadn't seen it where it's spotted with bitumen just like it is at the Charlene Mine. So that's a really good sign. We're quite hopeful that we're going to identify more anomalies and we'll have a much larger target area to follow up on and move that project forward. I'm pretty excited about getting to work on that. 

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. It's an exciting time to be a gold, silver, copper, metals explorer. I can't wait for assays. I'm looking forward to seeing what those numbers look like, what you learn and what the next step is moving forward. Jason, anything else that you'd like to add? 

Jason Weber: No, just with respect to the program at Horsethief, I think we go into these, where obviously we want to hit a high-grade gold mineralization whenever we can, but I think we're really pleased with the way the program's gone because some of the features we seen on surface we've been able to follow up at depth. The geology is holding together there well. So it's been a fun program to execute. Now we just have to wait and see what the results come back from the lab.

Gerardo Del Real: Sounds good. Jason, we'll chat soon again. Thanks again for your time. 

Jason Weber: Thank you, Gerardo.