On September 28, 2020 Brigadier Gold (BRG.V) announced that it has begun its 1st diamond drill program at the recently acquired Picachos gold-silver property, centred over the historic Viva Zapata national mineral reserve, Sinaloa, Mexico.
The Picachos asset contains four mining concessions, covering 3,954 hectares of land. That’s about 80 X the size of Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
In the southeastern region of Sinaloa state, Mexico, the Picachos mine workings are accessed by approximately 20 km of roads internal to the property.
The drill program is planned for a minimum 5,000 metres in approximately 40 holes targeting four high-grade gold-silver veins.
Drill Targets:
- San Agustin mine: underground channel sampling by prior operator returned average grade of 81.22 grams per ton (g/t) gold and 73.36 g/t silver across 1.2 meters (June 1997).
- Values of 185 g/t gold were cut across the bottom of a production shaft.
- Mochomos vein: historic rock chip-channel yielded a result of 18.5 g/t gold and 570 g/t silver across half a meter.
- Los Tejones vein with values of 28.6 g/t gold, and 114 g/t silver across approximately a meter.
- Fermin vein with values of 268 ppm silver and 0.3 g/t gold across 1 meter.
“We are fortunate that Brigadier’s core leadership now includes Michelle Robinson who together with her team, residing in Sinaloa, are intimately familiar with Picachos, the local community, and how to shape a sustainable and beneficial presence in the region,” stated CEO Ranjeet Sundher.
Michelle Robinson – an Engineering Geologist – worked as an underground diamond driller for Boliden Metals, while she collected data for her Masters thesis in Applied Science (UBC – 1994).
Later, she worked for Noranda and earlier incarnations of Teck, Vale, Nyrstar and Anglo American.
In 1998 Ms. Robinson moved to Mexico. She speaks fluent Spanish and English, has authored 20 technical reports and is a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101.
Sundher is right to highlight Robinson as a senior member of Brigadier’s team.
If you’ve ever done business in a foreign jurisdiction, you’ll appreciate the necessity of having technical experts who understand the business culture.
Note: I once spent 30 breathless days in Beijing waiting for a deal close, while Chinese entertainment lawyers kept tweaking a contract.
On the 29th day – in a nauseating surge of clarity – it finally dawned on me; the endless contract-tweaking was the Chinese way saying “No”.
Geological knowledge is a necessity.
Cultural knowledge is power.
Michelle Robinson brings both things to the table.
Brigadier intends to prove the depth, strike length and continuity of the high-grade gold-silver veins.
Ms. Robinson and her team will attempt to deepen their understanding of the source of the vein hosted mineralization and its potential relationship to copper porphyry mineralization identified on the Brigadier property.
The center of the 2020 exploration campaign will be the past-producing San Agustin Mine which has exploited one of the ore chutes of the major east-northeasterly trending Cocolmeca Vein System.
The Cocolmeca Vein system is comprised of several sub-parallel veins over a 1.5 kilometre wide zone.
San Agustin is the best understood of these veins, mainly because it has been historically exposed underground by approximately 670 line-metres of tunnels, stopes and shafts.
Collectively, this first round of drilling is designed to test approximately 1 km of vein strike between the past-producing San Agustin Mine and the Tejones Prospects.
Phase 1 is anticipated to total 5,170 meters of diamond drilling in 41 drill holes.
Additionally, there will be about 3 line-kilometres of trenching across several historic sample sites to sample the anomalies identified by the historic work and formalize the drill targets.
Most holes are planned at San Agustin and Los Tejones, with a few at Mochomos and other prospects. The drill holes will range from 90 meters to 300 meters in length.
Two weeks ago, BRG published sampling results from two major vein systems in the northeastern part of the Picachos gold-silver property in Sinaloa, Mexico.
The vein systems related to the sampling results are called Garabato and El Pino.
Garabato: early exploration is limited to a few geological traverses, sparse rock chip-channel samples and a widely spaced soil geochemical grid (100 meters by 100 meters).
El Pino: Historic workings at El Pino expose four quartz-sulphide veins. El Pino West is the largest vein in this group.
“Significant values include 160 grams per tonne silver across seven metres at Garabato, and 21.3 g/t Au across one meter at El Pino,” stated Sundher, “Further work including trenching and soil sampling followed by drilling is clearly warranted.”
“The Picachos property has never been diamond drill tested and boasts over 160 historic workings and mines,” states BRG, “Recent and continuing bonanza grade discoveries produced by neighbouring explorers to the north (Vizsla Resources) and south (GR Silver Mining) underscore the untapped potential of this particular region of Sierra Madre Occidental epithermal belt.
“Vizsla Resources (VZLA.V) made headlines when it dropped the following drill hole assays from its Panuco Project in Sinaloa State on June 24th,” confirmed Equity Guru’s Greg Nolan on August 31, 2020.
- 1,544 g/t silver equivalent {AgEq} (738.9 g/t silver and 11.06 g/t gold over 8.2 meters from 108.6 meters, including 3,348 g/t silver equivalent (1,527.5 g/t silver and 24.9 g/t gold) over 2.0 meters from 108.6 meters
“In the same region,” continued Nolan, “GR Silver (GRSL.V) announced a high-grade discovery at its Plomosas Silver Project on June 22nd:
- 1,235 gpt Ag over 11.0 meters, including 2,600 gpt Ag over 2.3 meters and 4,209 gpt Ag over 1.7 meters;
- 1,469 gpt Ag over 3.7 meters, including 2,827 gpt Ag over 1.8 meters;
- 3.6 gpt Au over 23.9 meters, including 43 gpt Au over 1 meter.
“In a remarkably well timed push, Brigadier Gold (BRG.V) secured a project in the region—the 3,954 hectare Picachos Gold-Silver Property—just as these two discoveries came to light.” – End of Nolan.
“Brigadier’s multi-talented team has raised $4.2 million and advanced the Picachos property from acquisition to drilling in a relatively short period of time and we look forward to keeping our shareholders updated as drill assay results are received,” stated Sundher on September 28, 2020.
- Lukas Kane
Full Disclosure: Brigadier is an Equity Guru marketing client.
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