Although the initial hype which sent the share price north of C$6 appears to have lost pace, Western Alaska Minerals (WAM.V) continues to release good exploration results on its Waterpump Creek project in Alaska. Earlier this week, the company published the assay results from hole WCP22-20 which intersected two sulphide horizons.
The upper horizon encountered 1.1 meters encountered 11.4 meters of 284 g/t silver, 10.9% lead and 14.8% zinc (including an ultra high-grade interval of 883 g/t silver, and 57.4% ZnPb which are grades you hardly ever see. The second horizon encountered 20.7 meters of 171 g/t silver with 5.8% lead and 9.4% zinc including a narrower interval containing 297 g/t silver and 13.4% ZnPb. We broke the results down on a silver-equivalent basis to grasp the lead and zinc numbers, but given the grades at Waterpump Creek, it’s actually looking like a base metal project with a silver credit. We used $1.30 zinc, $0.90 lead and $20.5 silver (the current spot prices).
As you can see, silver really only makes up about 1/4th of the silver-equivalent grade and we respect WAM’s decision to not report a silver-equivalent grade as silver clearly is just a by-product of the zinc and lead in these two intervals.
The interesting element of these assay results is to see how close the two mineralized zones are to each other as there’s just over 7 meters of weakly mineralized or barren rock. Additionally, Western Alaska mentions there appears to be a good correlation between the silver and lead values as each 1% lead value roughly corresponds to an additional ounce of silver per tonne.
Western Alaska has now released the assay results from 23 holes drilled into Waterpump Creek and it is starting to get a much better understanding of the mineralized structure. The massive sulphides have now been encountered over a 400 meter strike length, (plunging gently to the south) with an average width of 30-75 meters.
The 2022 exploration season is now over, but Western Alaska plans to hit the ground running in 2023 with a 15,000 meter drill program to follow the high-grade manto to be completed with three new drill rigs while the existing two company-owned drill rigs will drill about 10,000 meters to drill-test the similar north-south structures. Western Alaska has a near-term target of developing a 4 million tonne target at Waterpump Creek at a grade of in excess of 30 ounces of silver-equivalent per tonne.
Disclosure: The author has no position in Western Alaska Minerals. Please read our disclaimer.
