Rugby Mining Limited is pleased to report that it has, subject to regulatory and TSX Venture Exchange approval, entered into an Option Agreement to acquire a 100% interest in the Jessup Gold-Silver Project, Nevada.
Jessup, situated 100 kilometres northeast of Reno, is located within the highly favourable mining jurisdiction of Nevada, and is comprised of approximately 10 square kilometres of mining claims (Click here for Figure 1). The Jessup deposit is a volcanic hosted, low sulphidation gold-silver epithermal system with an existing historical National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101) measured and indicated Mineral Resource* containing 300,000 oz of gold and 5,090,000 oz of silver (Click here for Table 1).
*The Company will be required to conduct further assessment of previous drilling and new resource modelling to confirm the details of the Jessup Project NI 43-101 Technical Report as written by Scott. E Wilson for Rye Patch Gold Corp., July 16, 2009. The Company believes the data is suitable to report in this news release for informational reference only.
Rugby's President and CEO, Paul Joyce stated "We are excited to explore Jessup, a project located in a mining district that hosts excellent infrastructure and which management considers highly prospective. Given the downturn in the resource market, we have been able to secure Jessup with very favourable terms. Our exploration focus will be to search for new discoveries of high grade gold-silver mineralisation to complement the historical, potentially open pittable, resource at Jessup."
Previous exploration at Jessup comprised 335 drill holes and 36 trenches for a total of 37,726 metres ("m") with most holes drilled to define the historical oxide mineral resource. However, the historical drilling is considered too shallow or not systematic enough to confirm the geological controls to the high grade gold-silver mineralisation intersected in a number of drill holes such as JP06-50C which intersected 1.5 m of 50.6 g/t gold and 926 g/t silver from a depth of 19.8 m. These higher grade intersections are potentially the structurally controlled steeply dipping feeder zones to the relatively flat lying historical oxide gold-silver resource. Significant drill intersections are shown in Table 2 (Click here for Table 2), however complete silver assays are not available for all intervals.
Metallurgical cyanide leach tests previously conducted on the oxide material averaged 84% gold recovery and indicated that the oxide mineralisation may be suitable for heap leach extraction. Limited cyanide testwork on the unoxidised material achieved a maximum of 47% gold recovery and is unlikely to be amenable to cyanide heap leach processes. Further metallurgical testwork is required on this unoxidised material.
Source: www.rugbymining.com