Hi greaser,
The problem why investors have doubt of an open pit is because; when looking at just the NR,s, a person would usually not even consider diseminated gold,usually needed for an open pit, as an option. The news releases could be considered illusions if you will, only depicting that there is really nothing there. Its at this point, that the numerous questions arise. At this point you have 2 choices, accept the news releases for what they are,at face value ,make a decision and move on, if they tell you that this isn,t gonna work. Or, ask more questions of yourself, "how can this be?' So, you start this journey by back peddling through the historic data and doing cross references between the news releases and historical data. Its at this point, most likely with the first or second cross reference, that the two, being the NR,S and the historic data, are not matching up. So, most of us are inquisitive by nature, we continue asking questions to research and more irregularities are found, and so on. I have done this so many times now, that it isn,t funny, and for me, I save countless hours of research by saying that I trust all my prior research and that I am not going back any more only to arrive back at the start of the circle, that it doesnot match up.
To get more specifically to your question;the drill results are not demonstrating the potential for an open pit because of the sampling technique and procedure. You cannot define an open pit by taking .5m samples of a core here and there, with maybe only 1m sampled out of a 300m core. Its ridiculous. Your open pit depends on long intersections of low grade alteration, with high grade vein intervals to up the average. If the entire core is not tested in the alteration areas, no one will ever know if there was open pit potential or not. So again, the pertinent info is missing from all releases.
We know that the country rock has a certain degree of porosity that allows latter fluids to saturate, but the porosity here is minimal, and in most places, the mineralization could only penetrate a few centimeters into the host rock from the veins.BUT, there are large tested areas on the Tesoro, where the country rock has been mineralized itself from the earliest geological event in that area. A prime example of this is the A-7 vein, it is barren of gold, yet the host rock on either side of this veins holds economical gold in the host rock, for up to date widths of something like 45 m. Here is the proof taken from an early tech report from the property.
A7 is a swarm of four veins ranging in width from a few cm to 48 cm with an
aggregate length of about 550 m. Most of the swarm lies within a sheared and
brecciated zone with chlorite-calcite-epidote alteration. The veins themselves are
white and do not carry appreciable gold, but, as will be described in a subsequent
section, the alteration zone itself carries anomalous albeit sub-economic gold
values.
The northern part of the A7 swarm is within a zone of propylitic alteration in
brecciated and sheared diorite. Fourty-two trench samples of the altered diorite
with an average sample length of 3.0 meters returned an average grade of 250 ppb
gold within a north-northwesterly trending zone measuring 200 m by 50 m. The
highest-grade sample assayed 2.26 g/t gold across 3.0 m. Another chip sample
assayed 0.94 g/t gold across 7.5 m. This gold-anomalous alteration zone may be
of economic interest at a higher gold price
.So, you see,that particular area itself is economical today WITHOUT any gold veins going through it, but what is more important, is its geophysical signature which can be compared to other parts of the geophysics, mainly the anomaly area. Then you take the saturated sulfide area of C-1 and compare its geophysical signature with that of the anomaly. If anybody wants to make those comparisons yourself, I strongly encourage everyone to take the time and study it, I would be very interested in hearing the comments afterward. Anyways, to cut that short, I think anyone here sees what I am trying to say.
So, there are other host rock areas tested on the Tesoro, with 1 or maybe 2, I forget, in the C-1 area.In that area there are at least 8 high grade gold bearing veins discovered until dec last year. If you look at the Jan drill results, you will see 9-11, I believe it was, quartz vein intercepts in 1 or two holes, this tells me that there are new veins being found and appear to be spaced close enough together, to add to mineralized host rock to maybe an economical level. I remember Lori said that they were putting a shaft through in this area, not even looking for gold or following veins, and the material taken out of that shaft averaged 31 g/t! Think about that statement, it suggests very little vein material, so the gold had to come from host rock or waste. Apply that info to the C-1 area without factoring in the high grade gold bearing veins, and what grade do you come up with? There are countless hints like this through almost every bit of data done on the Tesoro, by picking out and analysing and piecing together all parts of a puzzel, you get a picture. And the picture I get from looking at 8-10 years worth of data, looks fantastic!
Your talk with Quantec; they could not tell you what they suspect the gold grades there would be, it would be a breach of trust between SLI and Quantec. All they can really do, and they don,t even have to do that, is to help you to understand how to read the information. The easiest way to tell you how to read it is; use what info you know and match it up to the signatures to figure out the rest of the slides. The most easiest way to do this is to take the facts from the C-1 area. So, we know we mined that vein down to 100m with a consistent grade of ~31 g/t. Plot this area to the closest image, in this case it corresponds nicely with line 5750. Cross reference your geophysical signatures to the known grade, then understand the scale of your signatures, and you get the correlation and can assign a reasonable gold grade to that signature for that particular area. But, there is more to it than this, and I am not gonna be all day writing this post. You might say lining up the facts once is coincidental, but when you go over the entire data and are able to establish the consistency in relation to the Quantec everytime, I question if that is coincidence anymore.
Two things could happen, the POG go sky high, or total chaos in the world. I believe the world powers have no choice but to leave the POG go where it wants to go, which will be higher.This will happen around the first half of July, if not sooner, depending on global events and greed. This uptick in gold today may be the start of the upward trend, but I believe it is only a spike that will be taken back down between now and June 20th. If the POG goes to $2000 before the end of this year, it allows a much lower gold grade to be economical, maybe even down to .15 g/t. So, you can see what that does in making open pit scenarios more acceptable to aquisition.
IMO
These are only my thoughts and I may be 500% wrong.
