Medinah Minerals (MDMN)

[RD759]

Underground exposures, especially in the form of drives/levels, are always better than drill core as you can view the exposures in 3D and conduct far more detailed sampling; however in this instance you have to relate things back to exactly what these exposures represent and where that style of mineralisation fits in with the bigger picture and what the main thrust of your exploration strategy is. Also it is worth noting that those tunnels have furnished no robust sample or geological data to date.

The 'Spanish tunnels', if they are consistent with similar types of workings further north in Chile are levels/openworks driven on narrow gold veins. Some of these working are of Inca origin and were expanded and further developed after the conquest. The workings are often shallow, working the oxidised portion of the veins. The host mineralisation tends to be lamellar (thin sheets within individual crystals) gold within iron pyrite, which in the oxidised zone is broken down to iron hydroxides from which the gold can be easily extracted with the most basic of processing by hand. Once the primary ores were reached the workings were abandoned as the processing technology did not exist at the time.

The tunnels would need to be fully mapped and sampled - possibly every metre - to delineate a potential resource, which is going to be a costly and time-consuming operation. Where this would fit in with a programme that would ideally be directed at discovering a viable porphyry system is difficult to say, which is why as many anomalies from all the available styles of mineralisation have to be identified and ranked first before an exploration strategy is developed. In an ideal world you would have enough cash and manpower to look at both the tunnels and porphyries (and both could yield potential resource/revenue streams), but in the real world there are limited supplies of both and how to cut up the cake and where to allocate resources (high grade/low tonnage target or low grade/high to massive tonnage target) is a decision you can only take when you done the groundwork and have good mapping/geochemical/geophysical data to hand.

if I were a potential suitor, I think I would be very happy with the information I could get from those tunnels.

Indeed, but you wouldn't part with your money until that information was actually available and certified bona-fide would you?