David Bond am 2.6.:
SNS Going For The Silver
Wallace, Idaho – We are standing near the mountaintop just west of the Sunshine Mine and just east of the Bunker Hill. Far below us Kellogg looks like a postage stamp, its prominent new feature being the new condos going up for the ski hill and golf course, the links under construction over top of the Superfund burial site of the old Bunker Hill smelter. Across the canyon are the early diggings of the Blake brothers, who discovered the Sunshine Mine in 1884. Sunshine's parking lot is full these days, as is the lot at the Lucky Friday and Galena mines. We can't quite see it from here, but just north of this drainage the boys at New Jersey are digging into the mountains by Murray, and finding gold and silver.
The condos are selling for more money that you'd have needed to buy a whole batch of patented claims, or maybe even a whole company or town, in this camp a dozen years ago. The rock rabbits are thick as May ticks on the hillsides hereabouts. Canadians are everywhere here: there are more TSX companies in the Coeur d'Alenes right now than Amex or Pinks or NYSE types. For better or worse we have been discovered.
Our reverie is interrupted by a comment from one Brian White, SNS Silver's geologist, as he gets ready to kick off one of the most ambitious exploration campaigns ever mounted by a junior company in this district. “If there's a major orebody up here, it won't escape us,” says White.
Brian White is the guy, very well respected by even the most cynical of mining operators up here, who is of the belief that the Coeur d'Alene Mining District's “upper country” only marginally mined and explored in early days may carry extensions of the very veins that made this camp so famous. With his Jack Russell terrier Jake at his heel, he takes out a geologists' measuring tape and marks out 100 yards of funny-coloured float rock high up on this mountain that he believes is evidence that the boiling-hot water that carried silver to the lower country oozed out way up to the top of this mountain, too.
Here are Brian's particulars, boosted right off of SNS Silver's website but fairly common knowledge in these parts:
- Involved in exploration and applied exploration and rock mechanics research in the Coeur d'Alene Mining District for 30 years.
- Worked for all major companies and in nearly all mines that have been active during this time, as well as for the Spokane Research Laboratory of the US Bureau of Mines, which, later, became part of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The Spokane Research Lab has long led field-oriented rock burst and rock mechanics research in the district.
- Applied regional stratigraphy to the exploration and study of the important red-bed-associated copper-silver deposits of the Revett Copper Belt of northwest Montana and northern Idaho;
- Substantially reinterpreted the major tectonism of the Coeur d'Alene district and the Lewis and Clark line, an important tectonic lineament that hosts the district and helped identify the metamorphic shear zones that apparently created the veins.
- Identified and defined the Noxon line, a northerly trending structural lineament that is inferred to have localized Sullivan- and Revett Copper Belt-type deposits that were later mobilized into Coeur d'Alene veins, thereby accounting for the unusual abundance of lead, zinc, and, especially, silver in the Coeur d'Alene district.
- He pioneered lithologic control of ore as an effective tool for exploration in the Coeur d'Alene district.
- He also perfected the field usefulness of carbonate zonation about veins as an effective tool of exploration that is sometimes capable of detecting veins up to hundreds of meters away.
About all of which, as anybody here in the district would tell you: “He is one helluva geologist and a good guy, too.”
“I was worried that my theory about upper extensions of the veins here would die with me. But now, perhaps within a few weeks, I'll get to know,” he tells us as Jake looks for a new bush to pee on. And there is something almost magical to see an academic guy like White actually get a green light to test a theory all the way out to its success or failure. He has an able young assistant in Jesse Bird, whose undergraduate work at the University of Idaho and his postings with the Idaho Geological Survey put him high up on the list of Coeur d'Alene District expertise.
Craig Durick, another U of I alum, is superintending the Crescent project and has worked for a variety of major silver producers including Asarco, Coeur D'Alene Mines, Sunshine Mining Co., The New Bunker Hill Mining Co., U.S. Silver, Bunker Limited Partnership and cut his teeth at the Crescent 16 years ago. So yeah, he knows these rocks, too.
White's exploration program consists of a fan-patterned drilling operation, starting about 2,500 feet above the mine's main Hooper Tunnel adit, from the surface. As the months progress, drilling will commence from underground workings at the Hooper and older, higher-up portals. What's instructive to know is that “conventional wisdom” about this district discarded rocks that were assaying below about 20 ounces/ton of silver. When silver was at $1.29 this made sense, just as in Nevada, where gold miners tossed away rock that was worth less than $20 a ton, or 1 ounce/ton. Grades below 10 ounces/ton are economic at today's prices if stope-mined, and lower grades than that are economic using bulk-mining technologies.
In mining, as with real estate, location is everything. Positioned in a cat-bird's seat between Bunker Hill and Sunshine, it would take a special kind of fool not to find ore at the Crescent. Weirder things have happened, and drilling from the surface only infers an ore body. At some point, you have to go hacking into the rock for a first-hand look, as the brass-board in the company dry already indicates they are. What's enervating about the Crescent Mine crowd is that they have the will to do the hard work. They are doing it. I like guys who keep their promises. As long as White is happy and his department is funded, so too should be SNS Silver's shareholders.
What a rush it would be, if a 30-year-old theory kicking around an academician's head turned out to be right. The implications for the Coeur d'Alene Mining District are huge. The whole planet is rushing after 10-ounce rock. It could be no further than our back yard.
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