|
Dear Fellow Investor,
They were drilling in the wrong place.
There are many positive factors working for Great Bear Resources (GBR.V; GTBDF.OB).
But the most significant is that everyone else who worked the Dixie Lake property before them simply couldn't have figured out the puzzle to Red Lake riches...because a key set of holes were actually drilled in the wrong place!
And now that Great Bear's team has shown that they may have figured out precisely where the rich Red Lake-type gold mineralization lies, their next set of drill holes could mark one of the biggest discoveries in recent memory.
Allow me to explain...
Finding An Error In The Treasure Map
Great Bear controls the Dixie Lake project in the legendary Red Lake, Ontario mining district. Their project is close to Pure Gold Mining's (PGM.V) high-profile Madsen Gold project, and shares some of the high-grade characteristics of that project.
In fact, the high-grade nature of the gold at Dixie Lake has attracted a lot of attention and money from other operators over the years. Many holes hit the kind of high-grade gold that the Red Lake district is famous for, but no one was able to connect the holes in any sort of a continuous fashion.
So, after a long history of corporate mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies, the project ended up an orphan at the bottom of the resource market in 2015.
The geological team who bought it out of court proceedings put it into Great Bear and then brought the company into the Discovery Group of companies, headed by noted mining financier John Robins, and they all set about trying to figure out why the high-grade drill results from the previous operators were so discontinuous.
A bit of ground-truthing led them to discover that some of the previous drill holes that didn't hit were actually misplaced — as much as 70 meters away from where they were supposed to be — and completely missed the gold-bearing structure.
So the company raised just enough money to drill eight holes targeting mineralization where their new interpretation said it should be.
This was a risky move. If the holes missed, it could crater the entire project in the market's eyes.
But the results were far from disappointing. In fact, all eight holes hit and completely validated the team's new interpretation.
Not only that, but the grades were exceptional, highlighted by Hole 5, which hit 10.40 meters of 16.84 g/t gold, which included 7.85 meters of 21.53 g/t gold.
The rest of the holes were lower grade, but confirmed the existence of a structure which, if it is analogous to other Red Lake deposits, will show grades increasing at depth.
Why This Is So Important
The best place to find gold is where it's already been found. Red Lake is a standout in that category.
This area of western Ontario has produced 28 million ounces of gold from ore averaging 15 g/t gold. That is a huge amount of very high-grade gold.
All those Red Lake gold deposits share certain traits. Gold generally occurs at mafic-felsic boundaries within the Red Lake Greenstone Belt or where greenstone rocks butt up against sedimentary rocks. It helps when rocks have been stretched and folded to create openings that can fill with gold.
So if you are looking for more Red Lake gold, you start where the right kinds of structures run through the right rock types and boundaries.
Great Bear's Dixie Lake project offers exactly that combination of traits. It also offers historic gold drill hits in a land package where divided ownership — and some misplaced drill holes kept explorers guessing wrongly for years.
Those were the first things that attracted me to personally invest in this company.
Then I learned that Great Bear has a tight share structure and strong management. And that the company had already spent 18 months diving through historic data and reinterpreting geology, They also cleaned up project ownership, cleared away old royalties and expanded the property.
Most importantly, they got on the ground to try to figure out why everyone else had gone wrong.
It was then that they discovered some drill-holes had been placed as much as 70 meters away from where they were mapped. And in Red Lake, where ultra-high-grade gold can be found in very narrow structures, a 70-meter miss is as good as a mile.
That's when they decided to test their new theories with a risky, eight-hole drill program.
And it was a clear success. Dixie Lake returned high-grade gold from 500 meters of strike and to 100 meters depth. And the gold was very consistent — in a district where nugget-y gold means drilling often misses as often as it hits, Dixie Lake has returned better than 3 g/t gold in 70 of 73 holes, including lots of very high-grade hits.
That's a good start — but what's exciting is the potential for much more.
Great Bear will test four exploration targets at Dixie Lake in a drill program that just got underway. The team is going to look below the known zone, because gold grades often get better with depth in Red Lake.
The company is also going to look two kilometers along strike to the northwest, where the team has found gold in the same structures and rocks.
And it's going to look to the southeast, where the gold-bearing structure folds back on itself, the kind of hinge that often carries globs of gold in Red Lake. And it's going to look beyond the hinge for another entire limb of mineralization to the south.
Success on any one of these targets would change the scale of gold potential at Dixie Lake immediately.
And this work got underway just last week.
I named Great Bear a Top Pick for 2018 based on all this: the company's people, its tight corporate structure, and the strong exploration potential at Dixie Lake.
Then a bonus factor appeared.
Another Potential Red Lake Gold Discovery
Great Bear has a second bite at the Red Lake apple in its West Madsen project. It's only 20 kilometers from Dixie Lake and offers similar potential, but has seen much less work.
Great Bear planned to slowly get active at West Madsen…but now another explorer has discovered high-grade gold less than two kilometers away, on a structure that clearly continues right across the property line.
In its first drill program at this new discovery, Pure Gold Mining intersected near-surface gold in multiple targets and has already defined high-grade mineralization over more than 800 meters of strike.
The best grades came at the southwest end of that strike, with hits like 33.3 g/t gold over 8.3 meters and 24.2 g/t gold over 1 meter. The structure showed good continuity, especially for a first-pass drill test, with hits 500 meters to the north returning 21.3 g/t gold over 10 meters, 10.7 g/t gold over 4.2 meters, and 25 g/t gold over 2 meters.
Christened the "Wedge" target, this is an exciting and impressive new discovery. Pure Gold hasn't stopped drilling there since the discovery and another set of results could come any day.
It's likely some of the pending holes step even closer to Great Bear's ground, given that Wedge returned its best hits from the southwest end of its strike.
I don't know what Pure Gold will report next, but odds of success are fairly high given that they're now working to expand a discovery that's already in the books. And the closer they step to Great Bear's boundary, the more interest investors will have in the neighboring company.
It means Great Bear's background project is now also attracting attention.
And deservedly so: The neighboring Madsen project hosts an historic high-grade mine and current owner Pure Gold is having great success finding more. The new gold discovery is just 1.6 km from GBR's ground and the zone could well continue right across the property line, right to where historic work returned gold at West Madsen.
Checking Off Every Box
• The right rocks. The right structures. Golden evidence.
• Strong results and targets at one project, where drills just started turning.
• A new discovery just across the property line and right along structure at another property, where fieldwork is imminent.
• A technical team with deep Red Lake expertise.
• A clean company with a tight share structure and a pre-discovery valuation.
• ...And all in a district where discoveries have been turning into mines for decades.
Exploration is risky but success is very rewarding. With so many factors aligned in its favor — and drilling on a high-potential program underway at this very moment — I see GBR as a standout stock poised to not only take off in 2018...but to do it soon.
All the best,
Gwen Preston
Editor, Resource Maven
Brien Lundin
Editor, Gold Newsletter
CLICK HERE
For More Information
On Great Bear Resources
|
