Base metals and gold junior Todd River Resources has joined the ever-increasing ranks of mineral explorers suffering from slowdowns at Australian assay labs as it waits for results from recent drilling. The company is racing to get follow-up work on the Berkshire Valley project underway prior to the start of this year’s crop seeding season.
The Berkshire Valley project sits 160 kilometres north of Perth in the south west Yilgarn Craton in WA’s wheatbelt and more importantly lies only 100km north of the Chalice Mining’s world-class nickel, copper, palladium group elements, or Ni-Cu-PGE Julimar discovery.
The clearly frustrated company said analytical results from the shallow reconnaissance drilling program completed before the Christmas break and the recently completed RC drilling campaign are currently all still at the laboratory although it said the laboratory had prioritised several RC samples for analysis.
RC drilling on deeper areas of interest had been completed where earlier shallow reconnaissance aircore drilling and geochem had picked up Ni-Cu-PGE indicators. Todd River had previously sunk 13 RC drill holes for a total of around 2000m.
A Moving Loop Electromagnetic, or “MLTEM” survey had also been wrapped up over two parts of the Berkshire Valley area, namely the Eastern Trend and a single intrusion at the northern end of an observed chain of intrusions.
One area of interest at Berkshire is the Mako prospect, where drillholes intersected pyrite and pyrrhotite sulphides up to 15 per cent.
However, Todd River isn’t sitting on its hands whilst it waits for the recalcitrant assays.
In March it plans to fly a SkyTEM survey, a high-resolution subsurface mapping tool originally designed to identify groundwater systems, over four separate areas of its Nerramyne Copper project, a 40km x 6km copper anomaly in the Northern Yilgarn. If encouraged by the results the company said it would apply to the State Government for funding under its Exploration Incentive Scheme.
The company has also tabled an activity timeline of work planned for the remainder of the year across its three other assets - the zinc-lead-silver Pingandy project in the Pilbara, the Ni-Cu-PGE Nanutarra project also in the Pilbara and the copper-zinc-silver at the Mt Hardy project in the NT.
With more than $7.5m in the bank, Todd River has more than enough exploration cash to keep unravelling the geology across its significant asset portfolio for some time to come. The unusual problem it faces is having to plan its work around the lucrative wheat season as it explores farmland. It’s not getting any help from the labs who are causing issues across the industry with the delays in assay results. Some results to confirm Todd River on the right track is just the tonic the junior needs to give it confidence to kick on before the seeder arrives.
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