Journey Resources Corp. is making quick progress at Charay and Mining MarketWatch Journal anticipates the mine will be operational in Q2 2010 -- this will result in a significant cash flow boost to the Company and take its valuation to a new level as a functioning operation. Journey is well capitalized to see the project to fruition. Management, geologists, and contractors all converged at Charay this January 2010 to solidify logistics, among other tasks, for low-cost mining of the high grade vein-hosted Charay gold-silver deposit.
Journey Resources is moving ahead quickly at Charay as it arranges for initial bulk sampling followed by ongoing low-cost mining of the high grade vein-hosted gold-silver deposit. Jack Bal, President & CEO of Journey Resources Corp., returned from Charay with a check list of critical tasks complete and offered Mining MarketWatch Journal the following synopsis "We had several major things on our list to accomplish and we knocked off every one of them. 1) One was metallurgy; we shipped a 400kg sample to our metallurgist in Hermosillo and visited their facilities. 2) Second, was to organize a drill program and we decided in that process with the driller to import our drill (JNY.V owns its own Hydacore 2000 drill that it purchased ~2 years ago for ~$500,000) and have it on the property to be available for continuous drilling. We have started that process, we have an importer that we are working with to bring the drill into Mexico probably within two weeks -- the drill is in transit now. 3) Third, was to negotiate a deal with a mill to take our ore, we have a verbal agreement but don't want to sign one until we knew what the metallurgy was, but we did establish that a mill ~1 hour from the property which is 400TPD is available. 4) We wanted to develop a relationship with a mining contract group that we trusted and the main one on our list was a group from Quebec that's currently running all the operations for a major Canadian mining Company in Sinaloa State Mexico. So we did a tour of their mine and the mining contractor has been to our property, we have sent them all our data -- they want to mine our project and we are waiting for a proposal from them."
Metallurgical results are expected back soon. It looks like a large component of Journey's Charay gold will be free gold and the balance appears to be amenable to using cyanide. There appears very little sulphide, almost completely oxide. The grades will probably pick up on some samples using a different protocol to account for free gold as fire assay alone did not account for free gold.
Based on initial metallurgical results, mainly verbal right now, it looks like Journey can probably grind the material on site, do gravity separation to extract the majority of gold, and then leach the rest out all on site. This will really lower the costs and at the end of the day Journeys product is almost pure gold. The cost savings would drop the already estimated ~$100 per tonne all-in cost of getting material to concentrate using a mill. If Journey's metallurgy shows the rock is amenable to cyanide JNY.V won't need to transport off site, won't need to float it (leaching is much less expensive), and JNY.V would have more control of the final product.
A new resource calculation on Musgrove Creek is expected to be complete in Q2 2010. Mining MarketWatch Journal projects at least a doubling of the current 313,822oz gold resource based on the fact the old resource was calculated in 2005 when gold was ~$350/oz using a 0.8g/t cut-off -- higher gold prices coupled with new drilling results and a lower cut-off will allow a substantial increase. Results from the JNY.V fall drill program are expected this February 2010. To the right are two maps that identify where JNY performed the fall drilling. Mining MarketWatch has extracted these images from a 43-101 Report on Musgrove Creek (copy of that report available here).
http://miningmarketwatch.net/jny.htm
