JUNIOR explorer Zenith Minerals is hoping to keep up the...

JUNIOR explorer Zenith Minerals is hoping to keep up the momentum of its recent share price recovery, promising a rapid-fire flow of results as it investigates three 100%-owned gold targets in three months, any one of which could help uncover a large-scale deposit

22 May 2020
Speaking at a virtual roadshow presentation this week, managing director Mick Clifford said Zenith aspired to deliver a discovery and emulate the recent success of the likes of De Grey Mining, Predictive Discovery or Chalice Gold Mines - but whereas its peers tend to have a fairly narrow focus, Zenith prefers to take a shotgun approach, with as many balls in the air as it can juggle.

The junior has leapt from commodity to commodity, and jurisdiction to jurisdiction, over the last 13 years, priding itself on its nimbleness, ability to quickly assess the potential of projects in days or weeks, and do serious exploration to define or drop projects.

"It's the most important task in the company," Clifford said.

In 2020, Zenith has landed on gold as its commodity du jour, not surprising given the stratospheric price of recent months, and it is embarking on a program of testing its Red Mountain and Flanagans projects in Queensland and Split Rocks in Western Australia over the next few months.

Drilling is the order of the day at Red Mountain and Split Rocks, while sampling at Flanagans that could quickly propel that project towards drilling if it confirms previously overlooked, astonishing high-grade gold grades at surface.

Red Mountain sits in a region where some 15Moz has been discovered, across deposits such as Mt Morgan, Mt Rawdon and Cracow, but remains underexplored.

Zenith has defined an undrilled 1200m-long soil anomaly with grades up to 2.2 grams per tonne gold, and rocks that sampled up to 20gpt, associated with an IP anomaly around the breccia margin of a previously-unknown volcanic breccia complex.

It sees alternation and geochemical signatures akin to those recorded at prospects that have become mines elsewhere in the region, such as the 2.5Moz Mt Rawdon.

"Clearly that (2Moz+) is the potential target size we would desire, but anything exceeding 500,000oz would be defining for Zenith," Clifford said.

Flanagans was identified when Zenith went looking for ground around Red Mountain and started reading old reports.

"The aim was to find a new target that was equal to or better than portfolio, especially those with walk-up drill status," Clifford said.

"Flanagans has had only cursory historical exploration in the last 32 years, and it seems to have been overlooked as an outstanding project that has really high grades at surface.

"The original high-grade soil results were reported by parts per one hundred million - not the industry standard parts per million - and recent explorers assumed the samples were low-grade."

The reports actually recorded "pretty rare" samples grading up to 8.7gpt at surface, within a 1500m-ling soil anomaly, where rock chips graded up to 20gpt.

"If we were to get results that that at Flanagans we would be ecstatic," Clifford said.

Over in the west, Split Rocks covers 18km of strike, within 650sq.km of tenements, south of Southern Cross, a region where some 10Moz has been recovered.

Zenith's own drilling has returned the likes of 10m at 2.2 grams per tonne, including 6m at 3.32gpt, at the Dulcie prospect, and it remains optimistic for growth.

"Over the past few years we have pulled it apart, and we have defined 12 drill targets, five of which we are testing this year."

Zenith also has base metal interests, including a 25% free-carry through to any bankable feasibility study of the Earaheedy zinc project in WA, where Rumble Resources has had some early wins with two discoveries to date.

It owns the 100%-owned Develin Creek copper-zinc project in Queensland.

Develin Creek has an existing resource of 2.6Mt at 1.76% copper and 2% zinc, with some precious metals, and could be indicative of a VMS cluster.

Zenith has around 50km of the host rock sequence, and recently defined the previously unknown Snook prospect where a single sample at surface, as part of a systematic geochemical screening of the belt, returned an astonishing 7.58% copper anomaly.

"This is a totally new area. There is no evidence old timers or prospectors even found this outcrop," Clifford said.

Snook "has all of the signatures as rocks from existing deposits", he said.

Zenith shares have recently traded at a 12-month peak of A9c, and were 8.9c in early trade, capitalising the company at $21.7 million.