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Western Warrior makes first foray into Alaska Calgary junior drilling old high-grade gold mine on tidewater near Valdez Patricia Jones Petroleum News Contributing Writer
Bruce Evans, president of Western Warrior Resources Inc., hopes the seven-year wait to explore his company’s first Alaska gold property will pay off.
The Calgary, Alberta-based junior exploration company said Aug. 14 that it plans to start core drilling in late August on its shuttered Cliff Mine property located on tidewater, seven miles from Valdez, Alaska, overlooking Shoup Bay.
Last mined in 1942, the high-grade, underground gold deposit has never been drilled, part of its attractiveness for prospecting, Evans told Petroleum News in an Aug. 19 telephone interview.
Western Warrior finalized its purchase of the patented ground from private owners, heirs of the mine’s former owners, in early 1997. “Then the price of gold cratered … there was no investor confidence, so we yanked (exploration plans) and just maintained it,” Evans said. “Since last year, we’ve seen a turn-around in the resource sector and the price of gold has come around, so it’s become a viable exploration target.”
Western Warrior, which became a publicly traded company in 2002, plans to spend about $350,000 for its first exploration at the Cliff Mine, including drilling 5,000 feet of core samples. Six to seven holes will be drilled, ranging in depth from 650 to 800 feet, Evans said.
“It’s something of the quantity that is manageable for a company the size of Western Warrior,” Evans said. First work on project Exploration work will start in late August, and continue throughout September. “If we have some good luck and results that we would like to see, we’ll keep going until the weather steers us away,” Evans said. “Winter is pretty gruesome on the water.”
Plans call for punching drill holes below the old mine’s workings.
“The data we have from the old production records shows they were plugging one shoot … we hope to drill several holes through that shoot,” he said. “More importantly, the information we’ll be gathering on this project … the data will help us design and implement the next phase of the project.”
The second phase may involve re-entry of old mine workings, which were de-watered, re-timbered and rehabilitated in a failed attempt to restart mining in the 1980s.
“With that work that was done, it’s still in good shape today,” Evans said. “It would be a pretty simple matter to go underground.”
Anchorage-based Watts, Griffis and McOuat Ltd., a geological consulting firm, recently completed an interactive 3-D computer model of the Cliff Mine vein and shoot structure, which will guide drilling.
“Below the seven levels of existing mine workings, we anticipate the rich, gold-bearing ore shoots mined in the 1940s to not only continue, but also multiply,” Evans said in a prepared statement. “Mesothermal gold mineralization, such as that found at Cliff, tends to occur over a large vertical extent, a fact we expect this first-ever drill program to confirm.” Historical high-grade producer With an average grade of 1.74 ounces of gold per ton of rock, the Cliff Mine produced 52,000 ounces of gold before being closed in 1942, when the U.S. government declared gold mining non-essential during World War II. A small amount of silver was also mined at Cliff, according to the Alaska Resource Data File.
Those state records show gold mining started in 1906. Quartz veins at the Cliff Mine are up to 10 feet thick and were traced for 1,700 feet, said Dave Szumigala, senior minerals geologist with the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys.
“The veins are in a complicated system of intersecting faults. Sulfides associated with native gold compose about 3 to 5 percent of the ore and consist of pyrite, galena, sphalerite, arsenopyrite, and stibnite,” Szumigala said.
The mine was developed by more than 8,000 feet of underground workings on 10 levels, ranging from 442 feet above sea level to 332 feet below sea level, according to the Alaska Resource Data File. Deeper levels were commonly flooded during non-operating periods.
Facilities were obliterated by the tsunami that accompanied the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 — the run up of this wave reached an elevation of 170 feet at the site of the Cliff mine, according to those state records.
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