Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Carl Ryan, the project geologist for Etruscus Resources (CSE:ETR, FSE:ERR). Etruscus is a junior exploration company that is currently drilling at its Rock & Roll Project in the Golden Triangle ("GT"), not far from the Snip Mine. Etruscus holds a huge property package in the GT totaling more than 27,000 hectares, however, the company is focused on stepping out to the west from its Black Dog Deposit (a VMS deposit with a 43-101 compliant resource estimate with an average grade of nearly 3 grams/tonne gold-equivalent). The objective of this year's drilling is to make a new, and potentially much larger, VMS (volcanogenic massive sulfide ore deposit) discovery at Rock & Roll:
In a news release last Tuesday, Etruscus noted that in its first drill hole of the 2020 drill program it intersected nearly 10 meters of massive and semi-massive sulphides including chalcopyrite (copper) and sphalerite (zinc). Drilling has moved to "Brown Sugar", a shallow portion of "The Wall" target that occurs at depth. It is down-dip of and has a footprint 10 times the size of the Black Dog deposit.
Goldfinger: It’s good to speak with you today Carl. How are things in the Golden Triangle? You guys are drilling now, correct? How has your season been?
Carl Ryan: Everything's clipping along here. We just got a load of the core back a few minutes ago actually. All winter goes into picking these drill collars, so it's definitely exciting.
We've had a productive season so far. There were some COVID delays to start but it seems like everyone is in the same boat now. We started with a lot of field work. We spent a lot of time up on the extended claim group, Sugar, Hoodoo North, Hoodoo West, up in the alpine where the glaciers are receding. It’s a lot of fun to get out there in areas that really haven’t been explored by others and in such a well-endowed part of the world. So that was great and that was in conjunction with some VTEM that was being flown across a large part of our property as well. The cool thing about the geophysical data is that within 24 hours, I can have the new data in my GPS and in my phone and be walking right over top of anomalies that haven’t even been identified before.
Recently though, it's been about finalizing the drill collars. The weather has just ramped up really nice up here. August was one of the wettest on record so people have been struggling for a bit but we've got nice high pressure and blue skies, 18 degrees Celsius, and that's perfect weather for working.
Loading drill core at Rock & Roll
Goldfinger: That's really good weather. Wow. So the plan is to drill basically through the end of the month, maybe into early October. And also, I noticed the targets you're drilling. So where are you drilling first? You said you just got core back, the first set of core. And then can you tell us a little bit more about the target that you're drilling now? And then tell us a little bit more about The Wall Target, which definitely has a lot of people focused on it.
Carl Ryan: So we're starting out right now with a hole that's targeting depth potential below the Black Dog deposit. The deposit itself sits at about 70 meters depth and when it was drilled heavily in the early 90s, they stopped pretty much all of their holes at 120 meters. There have been a few deeper holes around but no one has put in a deep hole right underneath the thing. We are looking for other lenses or fold repetitions and we believe the deposit has potential for a deeper intercept based on our findings from last year.
So that's what we're on top of right now: pushing depth potential to look deeper underneath the Black Dog.
Drilling at depth under the Black Dog, "The Wall" can be seen off in the distance
Goldfinger: That’s a really good summary, and it’s very interesting that there really haven’t been any deep holes drilled at Black Dog. And so how deep will you drill the first hole?
Carl Ryan: I'm thinking around 400 meters. It depends on what we're looking at. We always stop these holes based on what we're seeing rather than a nice round number. We may be able to look at the geology and see things repeating and then that might be a reason to push a little deeper.
Goldfinger: With the Black Dog you're drilling into sulfides, right? So you can sort of tell from the drill core, if you're into massive or semi-massive sulfides...you can just tell by the core, the color and the texture of the core, in addition to the weight if you’re into the good stuff.
Carl Ryan: Yeah for sure. The sneaky part is the precious metals content, which at the end of the day is what most of the value comes from. Now, we do know that obviously the golds and the silvers, they hang out with the sulfide. So sulfides are always good, but there's still that variable of how much gold was associated with that pyrite or pyrrhotite. that still adds some variability.
Goldfinger: And so can you tell us a little bit about the Wall? This is a target that you just identified earlier this year, and it seems to be very exciting in terms of its size potential, so what are the plans in terms of targeting that one?
Carl Ryan: Yeah. The Wall definitely adds a lot of excitement factor for its size potential so the next hole we are working on is called the Brown Sugar. It lies along the same trend as The Wall and is a little shallower so we are starting here and seeing what we learn. The Wall is kind of this big, broad geophysical trend and within that, we are targeting the Brown Sugar which is a conductivity high linked to The Wall target. So the plan right now is to start with this Brown Sugar hole and get a sense of what's going on out in this area, because no one's drilled out here before.
Goldfinger: What field work have you done this season that's led up to the diamond drilling that you're doing now?
Carl Ryan: The majority of the fieldwork was focused out on the extended claims. It's all a pretty underexplored area with a bit of work in the mid 80’s and early 90’s. So glaciers have shrunk, we've got a better understanding of the geology of the area and we had great help from Jim Logan, a geological mapping expert who has spent a lot of time working in the Golden Triangle. So he was a great asset and he really helped us. These deposits, they're fairly systematic geologically. So once you find out where you are in stratigraphy, what age rocks you're in, you can start to home in on certain mineralizing systems.
We were able to pinpoint the “Red Line”, which has quite a bit of significance in this part of the world as it is often related to big deposits in the area. Red Chris, KSM, Brucejack, they all lie near the Red Line.
And now we get to combine the geological data with the geophysical data and we can start to put the pieces together. We can start saying, "Oh, that has a similar signature to the Black Dog deposit... or that, that could be the big round mag anomaly that could be the reason for those veins up higher”. I think we found a couple of exciting targets on the extended claims that we're looking forward to letting everyone know about in the near future.
Prospecting at Etruscus' extended claims in the Golden Triangle
Goldfinger: It’s interesting to me that this is a really exciting drill program that has been well prepared with field work and geophysics, yet the market isn’t really paying much attention to Etruscus so far. I guess you guys will need to prove these concepts with drill results in order to really get noticed. I know that you also found some really exciting outcroppings at the Sugar Project. It looks like pretty high-grade copper that’s right on surface. So tell us a little bit about that.
Carl Ryan: Sugar is the farthest Northwest claim that we have and there are definitely some nice showings at surface. We're picking up hand samples there that have like 50% chalcopyrite. So, they're pretty fun to see and it's pretty awesome to come across in the field. Those results are still back at the lab though. But visually, when we spent time out of the Sugar and at the Hammer, there's some pretty nice copper showings. It seemed to be related mostly to multiple skarn-type footprints and alteration, but we will see what the geochemistry tells us and take it from. We are currently flying the “Hammer” with VTEM at the moment. So it'll be kind of exciting to see what shows up with in the next couple of days. And as for the drilling...
Etruscus Resources (Daily)
Goldfinger: How many holes do you think you will drill at Rock & Roll this year? And how late into the year can you continue to drill?
Carl Ryan: Right now, we have the Black Dog hole, the Brown Sugar hole and there's another target that could be worth explaining to you because it's kind of new and exciting... maybe we will leave that out for now though.
So meterage, I think is still a bit up in the air depending on what we hit, because we are at 120 meters above sea level. You know, when we tuck into something good, we can keep this going until Christmas if we want. Days get a little short, so logistically it gets a little trickier, but the sky's the limit. If we tuck into something nice and do a big raise, we're definitely in good shape because of how low we are in elevation and how much less snow we would see than some of the nearby projects. So yeah, the total meterage is a bit up in the air at the moment, depending on what we see, but we've got about four targets that we're working on at the moment.
And we would probably look to be done drilling those by the end of September. I think there'll be a bit of a reset at that point in time to see if it's worth throwing some more money at some of our hopefully good intercepts, although things do get a bit more expensive as you get later on in the year. So sometimes it's worth taking a couple months and playing with the data and coming back at the start of next season again. We can start nice and early as well with all guns blazing We definitely have a bigger window for exploration down at the Rock and Roll.
Disclosure: The author of this article owns shares of Etruscus Resources at the time of publishing and may choose to buy or sell at any time without notice. The author of this article has been compensated for marketing services by Etruscus Resources Corp.
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