Shares of Westhaven Gold Corp. jumped 83% in response to more good news from the company’s Shovelnose Property in southern BC’s Spences Bridge Gold Belt. The latest intercept, announced April 6, 2022, revealed 23m of 37g/t Au from the property’s northwesterly FMN Zone. The bonanza-grade discovery comes on the heels of a 1.1Moz Au maiden resource estimate (MRE) released in January, 2022. The MRE covered the property’s South Zone and included an indicated resource of 791koz Au and 3.9Moz Ag. This latest find occurs 2km northwest along tred from South Zone, which suggests that the initial MRE may be the tip of the iceberg.
These latest wins are due in no small part to the expertise of Westhaven Exploration Manager, Peter Fischl. Mr. Fischl joined the project in 2016 and has since earned the Association for Mineral Exploration’s H.H. “Spud” Huestis Award for significant contributions to the enhancement of mineral resources in BC. He joined Crux Investor’s Merlin Marr-Johnson for a technical breakdown of the geo-science behind these massive discoveries. The two geologists produced a complex yet fascinating insight into the geological techniques that will help Westhaven add tons to its next Shovelnose resource estimate.
Peter Fischl:
Hello, I’m Peter Fischl. I’m the exploration manager for Westhaven Gold Corporation. Westhaven Gold is a junior Vancouver-based mining company. We’re active in Southern British Columbia, looking for gold in the Spences Bridge Gold Belt. So we have four projects in that area.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Peter. Thanks for the introduction. Good to see you again. It hasn’t been so long since we spoke, but recently you’ve just put out a banging news release. So let’s talk about that. What did you find? Give us the headline. I know you want to repeat it.
Peter Fischl:
Yeah, so we drilled up in our FMN target area and we hit about 23m of 37g/t gold. So that, to date, is the best hole drilled on the property, and probably the entire Spences Bridge Gold Belt.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Yeah. I mean, I had to go back and check those numbers. That’s a hell of a hit. Low sulfidation epithermal gold deposits are famous for bonanza grades. Hishikari is the one we all studied at university, and I think that what you’ve just hit qualifies as a bonanza grade. I think perhaps it’d be really useful if you could just go to a map, if you could give us a map. Just show us where that drill hole is, and put it into context relative to where the main resource is. And what we’ll be talking about today is what this means for your interpretation of the resource and what you’re going to be doing going forwards.
Peter Fischl:
Okay, I’ll just go to find a map here. Okay. So let’s just look down here.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
The last time I spoke to you, you were in the field office. Okay. So there we go. So those are the four projects, and we’re talking about Shovelnose, which is the one down in the south, yeah?
Peter Fischl:
Yes. So there we are at Shovelnose, our flagship property, 30km to the south of Merritt. Just 20 minutes off a six lane highway, which is quite convenient. To the west, we have the Prospect Valley, about 30km to the west. And then right near, just north of the town of Lytton, we have Skoonka Creek and then about 12km north of Lytton, we have Skoonka North. So these four projects, these are all focused on these epithermal gold-silver systems, which is our main focus in the Spences Bridge Gold Belt. Just a quick aside here: So the Belt, it’s a belt of volcanic rocks, about 110km long, stretching from near Princeton all the way up to the northwest near Lillooet. It’s a belt of the mid-Cretaceous volcanics formed in a continental arc setting that are very prospective for hosting epithermal gold-silver systems. So this is the main driver for exploration in this area. So that’s the Spences Bridge Gold Belt. It doesn’t have a long history of exploration. It was only back in the early 2000s when the BC Geological Survey started doing these regional stream sediment sampling programs in this area. They started uncovering very anomalous samples. So 2003-2004 is when there was a bit of a staking rush on a number of projects in this region, including the Shovelnose project, which I think it was staked in 2004. And there was a couple previous operators doing some grassroots exploration work on it. Westhaven took it over in 2011, and then 2011 is when the first bit of drilling started on Shovelnose. And it’s been drilled every year by Westhaven since 2011, so it’s had over a decade of drilling now. The first half of that decade, I guess, we were getting some sniffs, but no real fire. So in spring of 2017, we brought in an epithermal expert, Dr. Jeff Hedenquist, and his two key recommendations were to do some detailed ground magnetic surveys and do a bunch of TerraSpec work, looking at the clay mineralogy to try and identify zones of upflow to try to pick out where there might be a gold-bearing hydrothermal system.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Do you have a slide on the TerraSpec or not? And if you don’t, can you just drop the screen and tell me about it just for a second? Because I’m actually really interested in that.
Peter Fischl:
In some previous PowerPoints for some presentations at the Roundup I had some, but I don’t have them easily available here.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Okay. Could you just drop that and just give me a minute or two on the TerraSpec work you did?
Peter Fischl:
Yeah. So, what is TerraSpec? It’s looking at the infrared spectroscopy to help pick out the clay minerals. And looking at certain features, absorption features, you can map out where there are maybe some higher paleo-temperatures in your hydrothermal system. From my experience in Russia at Kupol, we picked out what we call the Illite-Chlorite Zone, where we did a whole bunch of TerraSpec work and we could see where we tended to get the gold dropping out in the hydrothermal system. Looking at the clay mineralogy, you can see the zonation. So looking at, for example, the actual mineral species, we’re looking for illite, that’s our main target, illite plus-minus chlorite. And also looking at what we call illite crystallinity. It’s a ratio of two absorption features that you can use to map out paleo-temperatures in your system. And you’re looking for slightly higher paleo-temperatures that might be where you’re seeing zones of upflow in your hydrothermal fluids.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
So you’re looking for zones around 300 degrees centigrade.
Peter Fischl:
Yeah. 250-ish is what you’re targeting.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
And do you do that using Landsat imagery or is it a handheld instrument?
Peter Fischl:
It’s handheld instruments, yeah. You can do something similar to that, looking at satellite imagery, but really if you’re working with drill core or rock samples, you’re using a handheld instrument. Over in Russia there at Kupol, we were taking readings every meter. So we built one hell of a database.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
And that’s like an XRF gun. It’s a TerraSpec gun.
Peter Fischl:
Yes, exactly. And so now we did some preliminary work based on Jeff Hedenquist’s recommendations and we did a bit more. We picked a section going through the hearts of South Zone to see how it responds, and you can kind of map this out over what we call the three Vein Zones at South Zone. Our main vein zone there, Vein Zone One, you can see that illite and illite kaolinite are enveloping Vein Zone One. And you can see a bit of a lower temperature top to the system, what we call the smectite cap. So even though we don’t have a centre horizon preserved, we do preserve this lower temperature smectite cap, suggesting the system is preserved and that we haven’t lost really much to erosion at all. So aside from that one section, we really didn’t do a whole bunch of extra TerraSpec work. But in the coming months, we’re going to be resuming that and starting to work with what we’re drilling right now to help map out, in these new zones, where our preferred horizons are for mineralization. So even though we haven’t done much since initially drilling South Zone, we intend to get back to do more TerraSpec work in the coming months here.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
And is it like an XRF gun, which has got a tiny reading sensor point? So do you have to do multiple readings or does it pick up the clays quite easily? I mean, if you just bang it down at a point, do you get a reading on the illites, or do you have to do multiple readings on every meter?
Peter Fischl:
No, no, no. It depends what you’re shooting, but generally for alteration, if you’re mapping clay alteration, you want to get into the matrix of the rock. So you can get clay minerals forming along fractures in the matrix, in phenocrysts, a whole variety. And even within your veins, sometimes you get little pockets of kaolinite and whatnot in your quartz veins. It’s a whole variety of settings, but really you’re trying for the matrix. Like I said, at Kupol in Russia, taking a shot of the matrix every meter, a single shot of the matrix every meter was good enough to help see the zonation.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
And was this TerraSpec useful in locating this drill hole that you’ve been so successful with, or was this drill hole sighted just as part of systematic drilling?
Peter Fischl:
Nope.
“That Hole 1706, our discovery hole on what we call South Zone, Vein Zone One; that was based on looking at the illite crystallinities in those holes going back to 2016. There was a hole just to the northwest, Hole 1609, that had at the time the highest illite crystallinities on the Shovelnose Project, and it was sitting just west of a northeast 20 magnetic low. So we thought, okay, there’s our illite crystallinities, our vector goes right towards this magnetic low; there’s our feeder zone. And we drilled it. We drilled Hole 1706, which hit 80m with half a gram gold, locally up to two or three grams. But that’s when we first started seeing these banded quartz adularia veins. So that’s when we realized we were onto something new and different at Shovelnose.”
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
But the drill hole you’ve just announced recently, the 23m at 37g/t gold. Was that driven by illite crystallinity?
Peter Fischl:
No.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Okay. That’s systematic.
Peter Fischl:
That was more just systematic drilling this area on 50m spaced sections.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Okay, great. Thank you for humouring my little digression down the TerraSpec rabbit hole. But let’s go back to the map if we could and let’s get to the project scale. So am I right in thinking that where you’ve drilled this hole is in the FMN zone, which is over a km away from the South Zone?
Peter Fischl:
So we got a bit of a plan view. This is a bit of an oblique 3D view of the area of interest. So this shows a 3D open pit shell on our three zones at South Zone. So red Zone One, blue Zone Two, and a bit of green here, you can see has Zone Three right there. Three zones of quartz veining at South that contain the 1.1Moz gold equivalent that we announced back in September. But there’s the historic Tower showing area. That’s actually where Vein Zone Two comes along. It comes through here, through Alpine, and it actually outcrops at Tower. And then FMN is up here. So between here and the heart of South Zone, that’s about 2km. And that drill hole is just to the right of that star right there.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
And so last year you drilled 16m at 9g/t gold, which is that report that’s just shown there above the FMN. And you’ve got a rig turning at FMN. So this is part of the winter drilling program?
Peter Fischl:
Yes, but we recognized that what we were seeing in the drill core that we had something significant here, so we did a rush. It came back in a couple weeks, I guess. But for the most part, turnaround times have been four weeks or so, right now. So we started back in mid-January drilling at the FMN area, just to follow up on that high grade hit of almost 16m of 9g/t gold from the 2021 drilling. And now we’re starting to get some more interesting hits, including this highlight hole here, Hole 22-212. That hit the 23m of 37.2g/t there.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
So tell me what the process is. So the hole’s going down. What depth did it hit at?
Peter Fischl:
Where we hit Vein Zone One, that was about between 86m and 122m. And within that, the main heart of the zone was between about 98m to 110-112m. So about roughly 100m down hole for the core of the zone there.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
And you said you could tell that it’s something special. What does it look like? What gets you geologists jumping up and down saying you know that you’re in the big stuff?
Peter Fischl:
Well, first of all, the fact that we had all this quartz veining, and we were seeing banded quartz, adularia veining. Adularia is this kind of a white to pinkish beige mineral, potassium feldspar, that is an indicator of boiling. So we’re seeing indicators of boiling in the quartz vein here. We’re also seeing these dark bands and clots of amorphous sulfites and silver sulfosalts. One of the key things though, is when we start seeing these bands, we hit it with an XRF, and we see what kind of numbers we get on the XRF and when we started XRF-ing this stuff, we started seeing even gold. Normally you don’t get gold, you don’t see gold in the XRF results. But we started seeing gold associated with this quartz adularia veining in this Hole 212. So it’s not too often you start getting kicks of gold in your XRF, but yeah, we started seeing these. Also, other pathfinders in the XRF like silver, selenium, even copper. Copper, we almost consider like a pathfinder on the Shovelnose project as well.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Did you say galena? There was a word I didn’t hear in the middle of that.
Peter Fischl:
Selenium. Selenium.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Selenium.
Peter Fischl:
Yeah. We get silver selenites associated with the gold mineralization.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
So you’ve got your XRF gun and you’ve got your TerraSpec gun, and when the core comes out of the barrel and it’s laid into the core trays, you’ve got a geologist logging it at site. Once the core tray is full, at the end of shift, you collect the two or three or four trays of core, and it gets driven to your log site and it’s there that it gets shot and logged?
Peter Fischl:
Yeah. So the drillers come down the highway, drop it off every end of day shift in the early evening, and then in the early morning hours from night shift. And then we do a quick log for the morning daily updates and by then we’ve already probably taken the XRF readings if we see anything of interest. And then, during the daytime, we do the detailed logging and then next day or two it gets over to the cutting area where we saw it. And so the core is sawed in half. Half the core goes in the bag, half of it remains in the core trays, and then within a week or so it gets hauled off to the lab. Which are not so backed up right now.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
And you’re driving it down to Vancouver. That’s right, isn’t it?
Peter Fischl:
We changed that. The Kamloops prep facility is now fully caught up. We’re not seeing the months on end turnaround times we had been experiencing into last fall and winter. So now we’re hauling stuff right back up to Kamloops or they send a truck down once a week, depending on how we schedule things. So we’re back to a normal situation right now with the with the turnaround times. So it’s all good.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Great. And perhaps we can pull the maps up again and just describe to me what the drilling program is in terms of metres and allocation. Where it’s going.
Peter Fischl:
Okay. So here’s the map again. We started with one drill in mid-January at the FMN. Three weeks ago, we started a second drill in what we call the Alpine area. Through 2021, we were doing this resource drilling through the South Zone area where you see this open pit shell, trying to bring the drill spacing up to about 50m spacings. And through last fall, we continued to plug away drilling on these 50m spaced sections, even though by then we had done a cutoff in terms of what holes are going to be used to include in that resource estimate. So September of last year, we released that resource estimate of 1.1Moz gold equivalent in the three Vein Zones. But we kept plugging away into the Alpine area on this series of northeast trending sections. We continued drilling into Vein Zone Two, the blue, which actually comes through Alpine and extends all the way over to Tower. And on one of the last holes of this resource drilling last fall, drilled in October, we hit this interesting looking vein at the start of Vein Zone Two. And in February we finally got results back and we hit over 3.13m at 45g/t gold, only 40m down hole. So then we realized we got to do some follow up work. So three weeks ago we started up a second rig, and we’re now drilling step outs to the northeast and to the northwest around that hole that hit 3m of 45g/t gold. So we hope to be able to add to that resource estimate. So we’re actually drilling within the footprint of that resource estimate. But we’ve recently, through the late fall, drilled holes, including this hole that hits 3m of 45g/t, that were not included in the current resource estimate. So at some point we’ll update the resource estimate to include the new drilling and to include that high grade hit there. So we’ve been stepping out to the northwest, 50m spaced sections, and to the northeast, drilling up dip on that vein zone. And we’re getting similar looking geology as to what we hit in that hole that ran 3m of 45g/t gold.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Why are you drilling to the northeast? Because if you hit it shallow in that hole, surely you haven’t got much run room up dip.
Peter Fischl:
Well, when I say up dip, this thing’s only dipping about 10 to 20 degrees. It’s got a very gentle dip. It’s almost like you’re chasing a coal seam. It’s a very gentle dip on this thing. See, over here in that sort of the heart of South Zone, it’s fairly steep dipping, but we can follow it out. As you go northwest, it starts to become quite gently dipping.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Okay, thank you. And if you are extending to the southeast from Tower and to the northwest from Alpine, does that mean you are effectively going to fence between the two?
Peter Fischl:
Yeah, so we’re going to be pushing northwest towards the historic area of Tower. And from FMN we’re going to be pushing to the southeast. So hopefully we get to close up and add some potential tons here to this northwest trend. I should add right here, we have a total strike length of about 4km. Vein Zone One does continue as well to the northwest, to the Tower. And it’s Vein Zone One that we’re targeting in the FMN area. It does also continue into the Franz area. So we got a total strike length of Vein Zone One coming through about 4.3km.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
And that hit of 23m of 37g/t, is that in Vein Zone One?
Peter Fischl:
Yes. That’s all part of Vein Zone One there, yep.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
So you’ve got Vein Zone One, Two and Three, and they’re not totally discrete little structures, but they’re zones. You’re not describing them as Vein One, you’re describing them as a zone. So that must mean that there’s structural complexity, but are you effectively saying that you can trace from prospect area to prospect area that there are three broad bands?
Peter Fischl:
Yes. Like I said, Vein Zone One is about 4.3km. Vein Zone Two continues from South Zone through Tower. That’s a 1.7km strike. Vein Zone Three kind of goes into what we call the Lear area. That’s about a 0.8km strike. So yeah, these are discrete vein zones. Vein Zone One is dominantly metre scale veins, up to about 20m wide. But Vein Zone Two is more of a sheeted veinlet zone, tens of metres up to about 40m-50m wide. Vein Zone Three, again, is similar to Vein Zone One. It’s more of distinct metre scale veins, individual veins up to about two or three meters wide. But overall they are zones of veining right here. With Vein Zone One following the main northwest running structure.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Got it, interesting. Two questions. The first one first. Does that mean that you’re essentially taking this on a grid scale rather than doing the fancy geology of illites and smectites, and TerraSpec and all of that clever stuff. Have you got enough information now just to grid drill it?
Peter Fischl:
Yes and no. At the current active areas, FMN and Alpine, we can continue with these 50m step outs, stepping out along strike. But we’re still going to have to do some more grassroots type exploration stepping out, especially when we step out to the northwest of Franz. We intend to step out northwest along strike. So we’ll still be looking at all the geoscience, pulling in all the tools that are available to us. But for now at FMN and at Alpine, we’re going to keep on this systematic 50m spaced step outs.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Got it, thank you. And I have completely forgotten what the other question was. Nevermind. I got a brain like a goldfish. What next? So you are going to just keep drilling and update the market on a regular basis. Remind me of the overall meterage you’re aiming to do this year?
Peter Fischl:
Minimum of 20,000m. Last year, we drilled just over 40,000m in what was 103 holes. So right now, we’re going to do a minimum of 20,000m. There is a third drill on site if we need it. So we may ramp up depending also on our funding situation. We currently have about $3M in the bank. With two drills, that’ll take us at least into the summertime, maybe third quarter with two drills. But at some point we’ll be probably coming into the market to do another financing. But yeah, we’re looking at minimum 20,000m, maybe 30,000m. We’ll see. For metres drilled.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Well, there’s no doubt in the correlation between putting out good results and share price performance. I mean, your stock jumped 70% or thereabouts on that intersection. So let’s hope there’s more to come. That will only add value to your enterprise. The question I wanted to ask was that, in the news release, there’s a cross section of the drill hole, which looks as if it’s relatively complex in section.
Peter Fischl:
Yeah. Hang on. I believe this is it right here. Yeah, we’ve got that section right there.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
I wondered if you could talk me through that a bit.
Peter Fischl:
Okay. So we’ve got two holes where we have assays for. Holes 211, this upper cut right here. And this lower hole, the undercuts. And so we initially drilled hole 211. So that got that main hit right there. That listed as number seven, where we initially hit 3.74g/t gold, 20g/t silver, over 36 meters, including 11.3m of 9.5g/t gold. Locally up to 30g/t over 2m in this interval right here. Up high, we hit a lower grade section, about 42 meters of 1.16g/t. This is actually this breccia. At FMN, we get what we call heterolithic breccia. It’s a post-vein breccia, but it can carry mineralized quartz vein fragments that are picked up or cut through Vein Zone One. So it’s a secondary target at FMN. It can be mineralized. You get like in the case of what we saw in the upper part of Hole 211, right here. And so interestingly, this is all very close to surface. Over at South Zone, we get up to 100m of glacial till. Here it’s 10-20m of cover. So this is all potentially easily open pittable. So these broad, lower grade intercepts that we’re seeing in the heterolithic breccia. These are probably phreatomagmatic breccias related to intrusions of some of these rhyolite dikes. But they are carrying mineralized quartz fragments up to like half a metre or so in size. So we do get grade in this heterolithic breccia. So this will add to the open pit potential to this FMN area. But at the heart of Vein Zone One down here, in this upper cut, we hit 3.74g/t over 36m right there. So drilling below it, we hit some of the breccia again. There was a narrower intercept, like 1.2g/t over 13m by the 2 there. But then down in the core of the vein zone, that’s where we hit that 23m of 37g/t gold right there. And there’s kind of these lower grade shoulders, in part occupied by that heterolithic breccia that’s coming through. So the core right there, again, was quite a spectacular hit. So that turned out to be about 850 gram metres.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Yeah, that’ll do it.
Peter Fischl:
Yeah. So that was the best intercept so far on Shovelnose Property.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
So this is quartz Vein Zone One. It’s subvertical here.
Peter Fischl:
Yes.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
And in fact, it’s actually looking as if it’s dipping slightly towards the northeast.
Peter Fischl:
That’s correct.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Whereas, at Alpine, it’s shallowly dipping to the southwest.
Peter Fischl:
Yeah. Everything at Vein Zone One is moderately dipping to the southwest. Vein Zone Two, moderate to shallow dipping to southwest. Vein Zone Three, kind of steep to the west. Yeah. So this is slightly different in terms of dip, here. It’s kind of swinging. It’s near vertical. Dipping slightly, and in places it does go slightly towards the southwest, further along strike to the northwest. But in this particular area, it’s a very slight dip towards the northeast there.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Great. Well, thank you very much for that update. I continue to learn about Shovelnose and the project. Is there anything else that we need to talk about today? Because to me, it looks as if you’ve just got some really good stuff and you’ve just got to keep drilling.
Peter Fischl:
Yep. So a quick look at our long section. So there’s that 4km. This thing is a bit outdated right now. I’m in the process of thinking about an update. So this is where we’re drilling right now. There’s that highlight hole right there, right between these two lobes of mineralization. This is based on what we had from where we finished up last year. So on this long section here. That purple right there’s open pits at South Zone. And then here’s FMN, a couple kilometers northwest. So yeah, it was just a matter of getting back here and systematically drilling through this area on 50m spacings. And where we hit was right between these two lobes of mineralization that we had defined towards the end of last year at FMN. So it’s kind of interesting. It’s just a matter of getting there and getting down there with the drill bit and just systematically plugging away and we’re getting some nice surprises here.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
So that’s a really good point, because if you were kind of over-interpreting this and putting too much credence on the trend you’ve already defined, you might not have just drilled in between the gaps. You might have just chased those two kind of high-grade contours down the page and off to the southeast. But by being systematic, you actually covered off the gap in between it where you’ve got no data.
Peter Fischl:
Yes, exactly. So again, just a matter of plugging away. We knew we’d catch veins in the Vein Zone One there, but as for the width and the grade, it’s just a matter of getting the drill bit down there.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Good. Well, keep going. More of that, please.
Peter Fischl:
Yep. We’ll keep plugging away here, certainly. And for the next few weeks, we’re going to keep migrating towards the southeast, so I’m trying to get some more holes in this area right here, and who knows, maybe even further towards the historic Tower area. So yeah, things to come here, hopefully.
Merlin Marr-Johnson:
Peter, thank you for showing me those figures. That’s really helpful. Great. Well, let’s leave it there, then. It’s been a fascinating update. I’ve learned so much more about the project and those results you’ve got at the FMN zone. Just fantastic. And I look forward to seeing how the progress goes through the rest of the year. Thank you very much. Bye now.
