2022 Diamond Drill Program
The drill program for 2022 will use four diamond drill rigs to complete about 8,000 m of drilling throughout the zones. Boundary Zone is open in all directions, and the 2022 program was created to test step-outs on the outskirts of Boundary Main and Boundary West, as well as a possible link between the two zones.
Testing for the possible down-dip continuation of the newly found high-grade stratiform mineralization at Boundary West as well as testing for further massive sulfide mineralization near the surface will be among the step-outs. Three of the rigs will stay in Boundary Zone, where Fireweed plans to drill 5,800 m.
Between these four significant zinc-lead-silver deposits, the fourth rig will drill Tom West, Tom North, Jason Main, and Jason South, with a target depth of roughly 2,300 m.
The holes at Tom West will be focused on infilling high-grade zones where the present mineral resource is supported by small-diameter historic diamond drill holes with a poor recovery in the higher-grade sections of the holes.
As evidenced in earlier Fireweed drill programs, drilling large HQ diameter holes with triple-split tubes to optimize recovery has the potential to raise zinc, lead, and silver grades in these locations.
The drilling at Tom North will be aimed at a step-out of near-surface mineralization that might be mined open-pit. High-grade step-outs will be targeted while drilling at Jason Main and Jason South.
Fireweed will have four seasons of new drill data by the end of the 2022 campaign, which will be used to notify a new global mineral resource, including an initial resource for the Boundary Main, Boundary West, End Zone, and Tom North zones, as well as an updated resource for the Tom West, Tom East, Tom Southeast, Jason Main, and Jason South zones.
The new resource will be used by Fireweed to drive a new project Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA).
2022 Core Scanning Program
GeologicAI was hired by Fireweed to scan all of the 2022 drill core, as well as a large amount of the core from prior Fireweed operations and some of the historic core from previous operators.
High-resolution digital photography, LiDAR topography, shortwave, visible, and near-infrared hyperspectral images, and X-Ray fluorescence (XRF) scans will all be part of the scanning. By improving the next PEA, Fireweed plans to use this information to build geometallurgical models of the deposits that have the potential to deliver value.
2022 Muon Tomography Survey
Fireweed will install muon detectors in two drill holes at Boundary West in collaboration with Ideon Technologies. These detectors will be used to determine the geometry of current zinc mineralization at Boundary West, as well as to search for further mineralization in the region.
Muon tomography is a down-hole geophysical technique that employs naturally occurring cosmic-ray muons to detect subsurface abnormalities such as dense masses of zinc mineralization by measuring density contrasts.