Publisher's Note: Today we have the second and final part of Gerardo Del Real's interview with Mr. Michael McInnis, Executive Chairman of Abacus Mining and Exploration (TSX-V: AME) (OTC: ABCFF). The first part may be found here.
Today, we'll hear about what makes the Willow property unique and promising as exploration continues.
To your wealth,
Nick HodgePublisher, Outsider Club
Gerardo Del Real: Now, in looking over your company presentation, looking at the mapping [of the Willow property], I want to start with the geological mapping. You have two broad alteration zones, one zone in the north, one zone in the south.
Tell me about the work that went into the mapping and why you now believe that the southern alteration zone is the better target?
Mike McInnis: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe again, if we step back a tiny bit, I should put this in a broader context. Maybe just talk a wee bit about the architecture of a porphyry copper system so we can put our work into that context if that's okay with you?
Gerardo Del Real: That would be excellent Mike.
Mike McInnis: Yeah. Porphyry copper deposits are known all through the world, as you know, and they form underneath volcanoes. Anywhere from three to four kilometers underneath that volcano. This is a very hot area where the copper mineralization is deposited, and streaming out from that copper mineralization are extremely hot gasses, hot fluids, streaming up towards the surface.
Well, as they are moving up through the rock column, they alter the minerals in the rocks overlying the deposit, and created these various assemblages of alteration minerals. As the gasses, et cetera, rise to surface they cool and they make different alteration minerals. If we understand the alteration system, we can go from the cooler alteration minerals to the hotter ones, and that's a vector.
That's kind of what we tried to do. In addition to the alteration, these gasses, et cetera, are depositing trace metals, and they have a specific pattern that's well-identified within porphyry copper systems. So if you can define the trace metal pattern, you will also get pointed in the right direction.
In other words, some of the cooler minerals like the leads, and zinc, they're further away from their deposit, where some of the other ones are closer, like molybdenum. Very briefly, that's kind of the broader architecture.
We have a large system, and our plan with our work was to design a program to understand the distribution of not only the alteration, but the trace metal patterns and vector into the center. That was the premise of our program.
The geological mapping that we did, they had three goals on that. One, we wanted to confirm that we had the right age rocks consistent with the rocks that had held all the other porphyry coppers in the district. And we wanted to define the broader patterns of alteration, and we wanted to look at structure.
Mike McInnis: I hired a fellow by the name of Brock Riedell, who is a consulting geologist. He spent his entire career in porphyry coppers. Very, very experienced. So, I thought, "This is a job for Brock," and he and his partner carried out an exceptionally good body of work there. Goals were, "Are we in the right rocks?" Brock's work, plus the age dating said, "Yeah, we have the same rocks as everybody else in the district."
"Are the alteration patterns consistent with porphyry coppers?" "Yes, we got that."
And we defined some structures, so we could see if there's any dislocation that we might have to take into account when we did the drilling program.
So, very successful on the geological mapping. Alongside of that geological mapping, we said, "Well, we need to see what the distribution of these trace metals are, as well as copper."
So we did a grid geochemical program over the targets, and ended up with again, a pattern-worthy trace metal distribution. The cooler ones were to the west of the property, and the hotter ones were to the east.
The other thing that Brock identified is the number of quartz veins. We created a map that had the intensity of quartz veins. And again, the intensity was lower on the west side of the property, and higher on the east side. To get back to your original question about the two.
The alteration in the northern one is similar, but we're not seeing the same alteration that we would've liked to have seen up there. And we're not getting any of the geochemical patterns, and we're not getting any quartz veins. So we've focused on the southern alteration zone because it had all the elements that we were looking for in the geological mapping.
We think the northern one is likely an alteration pattern related to porphyry copper, but if there is one that's way off to the east end of our property... That's how we got focused in on the southern one, if that makes sense to you?
Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. Tell me a bit about the soil's geochemistry? The copper and soil's geochemistry?
Mike McInnis: The geochemical work, as I said, showed some of the trace metals increasing towards the west. But the copper, and this is on our website, the copper just showed a bullseye copper anomaly on the eastern side of our property. It's quite strong, and again, it's where you would want it to be in terms of all the other vectors. There's a solid copper anomaly on that east side, supported by trace metals increasing towards that direction. So, from the geochemical work, and that's both soils and rocks, we had a clear vector onto the east side as well, and the copper anomaly certainly supports that.
We did also some geophysical work. We did a magnetic survey, and we did an induced polarization survey, or an IP. The purposes of those, often in and around the center of mineralization, the heat will destroy the magnetite within the rocks, and as a consequence you'll get a [magnetic] low in and around the center of the mineralization.
This was evident to us on the Anne Mason deposit, which is a number of kilometers just east of us where the deposit, Anne Mason, lies right within a mag low, surrounded by mag highs. When we got all the mag done, we had the exact same thing, mag low over that eastern side, flanked by mag highs.
The induced polarization surveys, they pick up subsurface sulfides. The idea there is the more sulfides, the bigger the anomaly. So most of these porphyry coppers, they're surrounded by pyrite, and that ends up being your strongest IP. But right over the deposit of course you have copper sulfides and you'll get a weaker anomaly in that area. This is exactly what happened last we looked, nice IP anomaly just flanking this target. So again, a vector onto that target zone.
Gerardo Del Real: So the theory Mike, is that Willow has formed a separate porphyry center that's now displaced further west? Is that accurate?
Mike McInnis: Yeah. One of the original thoughts is that it was an alteration zone coming from quite a distance. It's a possibility, but we thought, "Well, we don't know if that's the case or not, so let's do our work and see if that's the case."
Brock went in with an open mind about it, because he'd always read all the literature that, "Yeah, it's an alteration zone, but the center would be probably far to the east."
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In fact, everything that we had done confirms that we had that target on our property. Brock Riedell, you probably don't know Brock, but he's the kind of guy that doesn't tell you what you want to hear, he tells you what he thinks. So if he doesn't like it, or he doesn't think it's there, you're going to hear from Brock that, "Forget it." Brock is quite firm that we have a target on the property here based on all this work we've done.
We've corroborated that work with spectrographic work. Spectroscopy is sort of an instrument that'll measure wavelengths from particular minerals, and without going into a lot of the science there, you can determine, fairly clearly, alteration patterns with the TerraSpec instrument.
That helped refine, if you will, our alteration patterns and again, supported a vector off to the west of the property. Sericite is a particularly good mineral for this because even though you have sericite, there are different varieties of sericite that will form under warmer or hotter conditions versus cooler. So the sericite that you find, if it's of the hotter variety you're getting down close to the center of mineralization. And again, that spectrographic work pointed us right to where we are right now.
Summing it all up, the geological work, the geochemical work, the geophysical work, the spectrographic work, they all vectored right into where we're targeting right now. So it's a very solid target that we developed and we're pretty happy with it.
Gerardo Del Real: The truth machine Mike, when can we expect drills to start turning, and what will the initial program consist of?
Mike McInnis: We've got all the drill bids in right now, we're evaluating them before we award the contract. We're in the permitting process, getting the drill hole sites permitted, and we expect all that work to hopefully be done towards the end of March or early April.
Then it's a function of whether we can get on the project, or when we can, because we want to get in there as soon as weather permits. You may recall it's relatively steep terrain getting up to the target area, and when the snow is melting off that can be quite muddy. We want to make sure that we've got everything dried out before the drill rig's on.
We're planning a program of three to four holes, 2500 meters initially, that will test the target and validate the premise and the hypothesis. If we get good long intervals of decent porphyry copper grade, that tells us we're in the ballpark and we've got to keep going.
It should be up and running sometime in April, hopefully before the middle of April, weather depending.
Gerardo Del Real: And just to be clear Mike, there are multiple targets on the property, correct?
Mike McInnis: Yeah, that's correct. There's actually another target that jumped out that we weren't expecting, towards the western side of the property. And then we have a number of gold anomalies that are flanking this overall alteration sheet.
As you're probably aware Gerardo, a lot of different kinds of golds are associated with porphyry coppers as well. We're looking at seeing if something catches our eye on those as well, see if there's another, specifically a gold target flanking this whole alteration sheet.
Gerardo Del Real: That's exciting, that's exciting. Well Mike, in the interest of full-disclosure, I'm fully biased, I allowed Junior Mining Monthly subscribers to participate in this financing. I want to thank you for the access to subscribers.
I know it was a bit of a roller coaster with the permit decision, as far as the share price goes. I want to remind everybody that I also personally participated in the financing as I said I would.
I also want to remind everybody that this is a high-risk, high-reward business, but with a market cap of $9 million, the 20% ownership of the Ajax project that isn't just going to idly sit by, there's still a plan in place there. And drilling at Willow, it's a pretty compelling risk/reward proposition to say the least.
Mike, is there anything else that you'd like to add?
Mike McInnis: Well, full disclosure too, I'm a shareholder and I'm participating in the financing too, as are most of our directors and managers. We're certainly behind this target a lot, and looking forward to it.
What I've talked about today, there's a PowerPoint presentation on our website and it goes through this. And what I've just talked about may help you walk through that website and see how that target developed on the eastern side.
Gerardo Del Real: Fascinating work Mike, I can't wait to get the drills turning, and I'm looking forward to visiting the property, hopefully to witness a discovery.
Mike McInnis: Well, we're hoping you do that too Gerardo, so we'll keep you posted.
Gerardo Del Real: Thank you very much for your time Mike.
Mike McInnis: Thank you.
For the past decade, Gerardo Del Real has worked behind-the-scenes providing research, due diligence and advice to large institutional players, fund managers, newsletter writers and some of the most active high net worth investors in the resource space. Now, he is bringing his extensive experience to the public through Outsider Club, Junior Mining Monthly, and Junior Mining Trader. For more about Gerardo, check out his editor page.