Gold Mountain unlocks high grade copper at Mt Wipi

Special Report: Copper-gold explorer, Gold Mountain Limited, has announced discovery of high-grade copper samples from its newly granted and highly prospective Mt Wipi tenement in PNG. The Mt Wipi tenement, which was previously held under an exploration application by BHP, was granted to the company last month.

Gold Mountain – GMN (ASX: GMN), recently announced a discovery of high-grade copper from its initial rock chip sampling program at its newly granted Mt Wipi tenement in PNG, with grades of almost 10% Cu encountered.

Located northwest of Gold Mountain’s Sak Creek and Monoyal targets, Mt Wipi was previously held under an exploration application by BHP. The prized asset forms an integral part of GMN’s current exploration strategy which Phil Jones, GMN’s porphyry expert, believes lies along the same major structure that is responsible for mineralisation previously identified at its Monoyal and Sak Creek prospects.

The grant of Mt Wipi, 100% owned by GMN, was given the green light from PNG’s Mining Resource Authority (MRA) on the 14^th of August. The local landowners and MRA have expressed their confidence in GMN to commence exploration activities.

Since the grant of the tenement last month, GMN has moved quickly, collecting a total of 28 float and outcrop samples from five drainages at the southern end of the tenement. Assay results for these samples are extremely encouraging with copper values ranging from up to 9.64% Cu, gold up to 1.96 g/t Au, and silver up to 144 g/t Ag.

The samples were part of an initial reconnaissance programme to determine the prospectivity of part of the tenement in an area where the local landowners had advised GMN of what they believed to be outcropping copper mineralisation. The samples were collected from rock outcropping in creek beds/banks and from float samples in the various drainages, with visible copper observed in eight of the twenty-eight samples occurring either as malachite, chalcopyrite or bornite.

All eight samples proved to have copper grades in excess of 1% along with elevated levels of gold and/or silver.

“GMN are very encouraged by the initial results which have confirmed strong copper mineralisation and outcropping in the Creeks. This bodes very well for further exploration within the tenement,” said Tim Cameron, CEO of GMN. Cameron told Stockhead that the rock chip samples of up to 9.64% are “amongst the highest encountered in the 5 years the Company has been exploring its PNG tenements.”

Prior to the grant of Mt Wipi, GMN sourced airborne magnetic data for area of the Wabag project which included the Mt Wipi ground, and commissioned internationally recognised RAMA geophysics to reprocess the data. Phil Jones worked with RAMA to identify ten targets for follow-up exploration which he believes have the potential to host porphyry, epithermal or skarn style mineralisation.

“The airborne magnetic data is also incredibly positive as it has helped us generate ten new priority targets on the new Mt Wipi ground. This further validates our confidence in the Wabag Project and confirms that GMN is sitting on very prospective ground with multiple targets. We will continue regional exploration work at Mt Wipi while drilling gets underway at Monoyal. The next several months will be extremely exciting for the company”, concluded Cameron.

While the Company has initiated exploration at the highly prospective Mt Wipi tenement, they remain focused on unlocking their porphyry prospect at Monoyal where a 2,800m deep hole RC drilling campaign is currently underway.

In particular, Jones is confident that GMN has identified a large copper-molybdenum porphyry system at Monoyal, and believes the previous drilling appears to be in the upper portions of the porphyry system. Based on this, Jones plans to test for high-grade mineralisation at depth.

This article was developed in collaboration with Gold Mountain Limited, 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.