In North America, there are certain household names when it comes to precious metal rushes and underlying trends, including Klondike, Homestake, Carlin and Timmins. There’s also the famous Comstock Lode, which was the first major discovery of silver ore in the United States in the mid-1800’s, which was followed shortly after with the discovery of gold in the area. To this day, companies of all
sizes still explore and mine areas around historic strikes with prolific output.
Small companies grind away with ambitions of riches where riches have been found before, such as Dakota Territory Resources (OTCQB:DTRC) looking to discover the next Homestake in the Black Hills or Iconic Minerals (TSX-Venture:ICM) exploring just outside the famed Nevada Comstock District.
Outcrops are prominent and sampling for both of these companies at their respective projects has been compelling, including Iconic on Wednesday announcing that it has found high-grade gold through surface sampling at its Hercules Project.
Hercules is located about 17 kilometres east-southeast of the Comstock District in Lyon County, Nevada. Iconic took channel rock chip samples from altered outcrops for every 60 metres across the entire 2.7-kilometre-long-by-one-kilometre-wide project area.
Surface sampling results disclosed today showed gold grades up to 17.15 g/t (paired with 99.5 g/t silver) and 11.34 g/t gold (with 161.2 g/t silver). Looking at the big picture of results, Iconic admitted that it expected gold/silver grades consistent with heap leaching in Nevada, but said it didn’t foresee a discovery of high-grade gold/silver intercepts.
Hercules is a Comstock-type target, only better, according to the company. The potential is there for bulk minable, heap leachable mineralization at surface. At depth, there is potential for high-grade gold, defined as greater than 10 g/t, and even bonanza-grade gold, defined as above 68 g/t gold. By Iconic’s calculations, the potential for high-grade gold veins at greater depths than Comstock are expected.
These comments are pertinent because most of the bonanzas at the Comstock Lode tapped out around 500 feet. The Crown Point-Belcher bonanza, which had stopes so large around 1,300 feet that square-set timbering alone was not sufficient to hold up the ground, moved deeper (from 900-1500 feet) and produced 54% gold and 46% silver. Although the ore body lasted only a few years, Belcher produced 684,000 tons yielding $32.12 million, while Crown Point produced 725,000 tons yielding $25.88 million.
Iconic is still early in its exploratory efforts as it plans for a drilling program and a National Instrument 43-101 resource study. Being early in development during a time when miners and commodity plays are certainly out of favor has weighed on thinly-traded shares of ICM, taking them from a high of 10 cents in November to as low as three cents this month. Shares were up by 14.3% at four cents in Wednesday action, albeit on only 1,217 in volume.
