Honey Badger Exploration Inc.
Thunder Bay Cobalt-Silver Project
Targeted Commodity:
Silver, Cobalt, Gold, Zinc and Lead
Property Size and Position:
37,850 hectares located in the historical Thunder Bay Silver District. The land package is ideally located close to roads, power lines, infrastructure, and a skilled labour force.
Net Ownership:
Beaver Silver Property: 100% ownership on 21 claims. Option to acquire 100% interest on 3 Cairngorn Mines Limited patents.
Silver Mountain/Mink Property: 100% ownership
Lilly of the Valley/Federal Property: 100% ownership
Exploration History:
Honey Badger’s land package hosts 12 past-producing high-grade mines with historic production of over 1.67M oz silver.
The Beaver Silver Property covers some of the most productive silver-bearing veins of the Rabbit Mountain group of deposits. including the high-grade Beaver Silver Mine that operated between 1884 and 1891 and produced over 500,000 oz silver at an average grade of 0.25% with zones grading up to 3.42% Ag (Ingall, 1889, Szetu, 1969).
Honey Badger’s Silver Mountain/Mink Property is approximately 50 metres south of the Silver Mountain Group of deposits which produced 700,000 oz of silver from 1888-1903 and in 1911 (Franklin et al., 1986). The Silver Mountain Group was also mined for stucco dressing in 1924 (Franklin et al., 1986). The veins in Silver Mountain were up to 1,500 m in strike length, trending east-west (Franklin et al., 1986). The historical Mink and Silver Wolverine mines fall within the property claims, but little is known about these historical mines and their historical silver production and grade.
Honey Badger’s Lilly of the Valley/Federal Property is approximately 5 kilometres east of the Beaver Silver Property. There are two historical mines on the claim group; Lilly of the Valley Mine and the Federal Mine. The Lilly of the Valley Mines have a 5,060 pound bulk sample which graded 2.98% Silver (Mineral Deposit Inventory for Ontario; Deposit: MDI52A06SW0003).
Mineralization Potential:
The geological history and the overall geological setting of the Thunder Bay Cobalt-Silver Project make it a prime target for the discovery of high-grade polymetallic silver, gold, zinc, lead, and cobalt mineralization.
Polymetallic silver deposits occur in two main districts in Ontario; that of Timiskaming near the town of Cobalt (the Cobalt Silver District) and that of northwest Lake Superior near the city of Thunder Bay (the Thunder Bay Silver District).
Polymetallic silver mineralization in the Cobalt District formed in a sedimentary sequence capping an Archean basement, and occurred in spatial association with diabase sills emplaced in an extensional setting (see Potter, 2009 for the geological history of the Cobalt District). The Thunder Bay Silver District exhibits the same geological setting and controls. Furthermore, a report filed with the Bureau of Mines in 1913 (REPORT OF THE BUREAU OF MINES VOL. XIX., PART II., The Cobalt-Nickel Arsenides and Silver Deposits of Temiskaming (Cobalt and Adjacent Areas), WILLET G. MILLER, Provincial Geologist, 1913) compared the minerals of the Port Arthur silver mines (Thunder Bay, ON) with those of the Temiskaming veins (Cobalt, ON) and found the following commonalities:
- Native elements: Native silver, native bismuth, graphite.
- Arsenates: Cobalt bloom, annabergite.
- Sulphides: Argentite, zinc blende, galena, pyrite, marcasite, pyrrhotite, chalcopyrite, copper glance.
Also, “The vein filling materials are quartz, barite, calcite, dolomite, rhodochrosite and Fluorite.” (T. Macfarlane, "Am. Inst. M. E.", Vol. VIII. 1S79-80, page 238) 1
The group of properties held or optioned by Honey Badger covers some of the most productive veins of the Thunder Bay Silver District. The geological attributes of the area and the spatial distribution of the polymetallic silver mines, showings and occurrences over approximately 100 kilometres suggest a good potential to discover additional high- grade polymetallic silver veins in the region.
Current and Upcoming Exploration Program
The Company initiated its exploration program in March 2018 and made several promising discoveries:
- >2 km “five-element” vein (polymetallic veins that can contain, amongst others, silver, cobalt, copper, lead and zinc) was discovered at the Beaver Mine.
- Airborne geophysics identified numerous targets on the project’s land package that exhibit the same response as the historic Beaver Mine “five-element” vein.
- Grab samples* taken around the 12 historic mines on the property returned up to 1,503 g/t silver and 14.94% zinc.
- Drilling identified multiple zones of near-surface, arsenic-free, cobalt mineralization (0.26% cobalt over 10.8 m in BM-18-004) and high-grade silver mineralization (1,254 g/t silver in BM-18-006).
- The Company identified several drill-ready exploration targets for its next drilling program.
* Grab samples are selective by nature and they may not represent the true mineralization of the prospect.
Based on the excellent results to date, the Company will initiate a follow-up drilling program in 2019.
Source: https://honeybadgerexp.com/projects/thunder-bay-polymetallic-silver-project/
