Gold drilling exploration planned in Nye County

Arizona Silver Exploration, an exploration company focused on properties in the Western United States, will begin an initial gold-drilling exploration program at the Silverton gold project near Tonopah.

The company recently announced that it filed a Notice of Intent with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to conduct the program and it received a Record of Decision approving the proposed work, according to the press release.

Greg Hahn, vice president of exploration at Arizona Silver and president of Arizona Silver Exploration US, Inc., who identified the Silverton Project, said Arizona Silver plans to drill an initial eight holes, each one to a depth of 500 feet.

“The holes will be drilled off of existing roads which have fallen into disrepair by erosion and need to be repaired for safe access for crew and equipment. This road repair work is estimated to take about a week. The drilling will take 2-3 weeks to complete, so all totaled, the program will take about a month from start to finish,” Hahn said.

Hahn, who also studied the project before designing the program, said the study of the historical data took many months to identify where the company wanted to test the mineral system.

“That includes reviewing geological, geophysical, and geochemical data collected by previous operators over the course of many decades of exploration. The preparation of the NOI took about a month. All totaled, we have well over a year invested in studying the data on the property before we proposed the initial drilling program presented in the NOI.”

The Silverton property has seen a lot of exploration in the past 30-40 years, Hahn said. Arizona Silver is following up on shallow exploration holes that were drilled in 1988 that showed the presence of gold in rocks that are similar to rocks that host gold deposits in the Carlin district.

“Other holes drilled on the property in the early 2000s targeted volcanic rocks that also contained gold locally. We acquired the database for the property from a previous operator and studied it thoroughly before selecting our initial drill target,” Hahn said.

Arizona Silver Exploration currently has three properties in Arizona: the Philadelphia Project near Kingman, the Ramsey Silver Mine property east of Quartzsite, and the Ramsey Property.

Silverton is the only project in Nevada that it has so far.

The next steps of the project will be based on the results of drilling of the first eight holes, Hahn said.

“It is premature to anticipate what those results will be and what we will propose to do next. If the results are encouraging, we will likely propose more drilling to identify the extent of the gold mineralization,” Hahn said.

According to the Arizona Silver Exploration website, the Silverton Gold Project is near the old Silverton Mine property, which is about 100 kilometers northeast of Tonopah.