Northumberland comes back with program of its own

The breakup last week of a lengthy 2-year courtship between Toronto-listed junior Northumberland Mines and nickel giant, cum- gold explorer Inco Ltd. may prove to be the best thing that could happen to the Cochrane Hill property in Guysborough Cty., N.S. Once the announcement was made President William Young quickly bounced back this week with an announcement that his company plans to explore the property on its own.

Young told The Northern Miner in an interview he is arranging the necessary flow-through financing to fund a $1.5-million underground exploration program.

The plan, recommended by Canadian Mine Development of Brampton, Ont. and James Tilsley and Associates, calls for a ramp to be driven at -15 degrees from which three crosscuts are planned through the orebody on 500-ft spacings.

The ramp would be collared on the south face of an open pit that was mined in 1982 and could reach the 200-ft level of existing underground workings driven in part by Inco by the end of March.

Muck from the crosscuts will be sampled in a different way than the tower sampling method used by Inco, Young says.

Inco took random 60-lb samples from every 50 tons of underground muck.

Under the recommendation of James Tilsley, a consultant who has worked in the Meguma gold terrain of Nova Scotia for some years, Northumberland will crush the muck to — 1/8-in and run it through a jig which concentrates the gold by gravity. By recovering up to 90% of the gold contained in the sample using this method, the company will have a much more accurate assessment of the mineable grades in the deposit, Young says.

Examination of the written report of Inco’s sampling program revealed wide discrepencies between grades obtained in drill holes and corresponding underground bulk samples.

In hole 306, for example, 10 ft of core assayed 1.18 oz gold per ton while muck samples averaged 0.15 oz in a 109-ton sample.

In another hole, number 301, where assays of 1.5 oz over 13.0 ft were reported in core, only 0.05 oz gold per ton were returned from a 146-ton muck sample.

The weighted average in eight drill holes was 0.31 oz gold per ton and the corresponding muck sample grades were 0.05 oz.

Financing is being arranged through the facilities of two limited partnerships: Mintax of Vancouver and Sofimine of Montreal.