Started in 2005 and working in partnership with First Nations, communities and industries, Geoscience BC is a non-profit organization funded primarily by the Province of British Columbia mandated to attract mineral and oil and gas investment to the province by generating, interpreting and publicly distributing geoscience data. Since inception, total funding for Geoscience BC totals $51.7 million, including a $3-million funding granted last May.
In 2013, Geoscience BC initiated its TREK (Targeting Resources for Exploration and Knowledge) Project, with a focus on B.C.'s northern interior plateau region, an area which is highly prospective for mineral resources and may also have some geothermal potential, but remains largely unexplored. Through the TREK Project, the industry-led society is providing, gathering and acquiring data from prior exploration and combining with their own research, including new airborne geophysics; new stream, lake, soil and till geochemical sampling; and new geological mapping and mineral deposit studies, a powerful data set to inspire exploration.
Information from the TREK Project has caught the attention of Vancouver-based Parlane Resource Corp. (TSX-Venture:PPP). Parlane announced on Tuesday that it has staked the 389-hectare Bearcat claim situated 76 kilometers west of Quesnel and six kilometres northwest of Nazko. The claim will be joining Parlane’s portfolio with Big Bear, a 31-claim project covering about 14,366 hectares in the Nechako Plateau's prolific Omineca Mining District roughly 100 kilometres southwest of Vanderhoof, British Columbia.
The claim block covers a prospective area identified during TREK’s till sampling project last year. Using the ICP-MS analytical method, the original TREK till sample returned values greater than the 98th percentile for gold, silver, lead, zinc and nickel and values for molybdenum and copper were greater than the 90th percentile.
Arsenic was the highest in the data set, followed by antimony and cadmium.
In November, Parlane collected an additional seven soil and till samples in the immediate vicinity of the anomalous site. Upon analysis, all the samples returned similar results to the TREK samples. Although the Bearcat claim is unexplored, there are gold bearing low sulphidation epithermal prospects to the west and southwest of the claim. Additionally, Amarc Resources Ltd.’s (TSX-Venture:AHR) prospect dubbed "Bob" is five kilometres to the south and the Nazko cone industrial mineral mine is nine kilometres to the southwest.
Parlane says it intends to begin exploring the property early this year by developing a closely spaced soil grid over the anomalous area, a property-scale soil program and commencing a geological mapping and rock sampling project.
Parlane is one thinly traded stock, often having very low volume or no volume days.
On Tuesday, 10,000 shares traded hands following the staking news, moving the stock up by half a penny per share to 2.5 cents.
