Diablo has started diamond drilling at its Lone Pine project in Idaho where previous and historical drilling has returned significant gold intercepts and identified two mineralised systems.
The 2,000m drill program will extend drill intercepts from 2020 at the Lone Pine Vein Zone that returned results including 1.22m grading 17.02 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 38.43m and 2.6m at 7.06g/t gold from 63.75m and test historical intercepts topping up at 18m at 3.75g/t gold within a 51m zone grading 1.7g/t gold from 36m at the King Solomon prospect.
Diablo Resources (ASX:DBO) notes that gold mineralisation at both prospects remains open both along strike and at depth.
“We are excited to commence drilling at the Lone Pine Gold Project,” chief executive officer Lyle Thorne said.
“The drilling at the King Solomon Prospect will be the first in 30 years, and we are eager to test the results of the historic drilling while gaining a better understanding of the mineralisation controls through the use of core drilling.”
Lone Pine project
The 21.8km2 Lone Pine project is located about 10km west of Salmon, Idaho, and 6km east of Revival Gold’s Beartrack-Arnett gold mine – the largest past producing mine in the state with a current resource of about 4Moz.
It is considered to be prospective for structurally controlled gold mineralisation associated with intrusive rocks along sediment contacts.
The first of the eight holes will test the depth and strike potential of the Lone Pine Vein Zone where very little exploration had been completed prior to the project’s acquisition by Hawkstone Mining in 2020.
While Hawkstone’s drilling was hampered by recovery issues, especially in shallow holes, it did return significant results from the steeply dipping, strike persistent high grade gold mineralised zone.
Gold mineralisation at the LPVZ is hosted by quartz-clay in a northeast-trending steeply northwest dipping shear in granite.
This quartz vein zone has been outlined by adits and trenches over a strike of 600m and downdip for up to 150m. It remains open to both the northeast and southwest along strike as well as at depth.
Meanwhile, no exploration appears to have been completed at the King Solomon prospect since the early-mid 1990’s despite several companies completing various phases of exploration including drilling returning significant gold results.
The prospect also contains numerous shallow pits and three adits, which were re-opened, sampled and mapped in the 1990’s but are now inaccessible.
King Solomon mineralisation differs from that at LPVZ being defined as broad stockwork quartz veining in sericite-chlorite-tourmaline alteration zones in both granite and along sediment contacts.
First pass drilling in 1990 was also found to have been drilled oblique to the mineralised zones while drilling in 1992 that targeted a newly interpreted northeast trend intersected several significant broad intercepts.
These results have never been followed up, with the King Solomon mineralised zone open in all directions.
This article was developed in collaboration with Diablo Resources, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.
This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.