Teryl Resources Begins Drilling at Lavender Pit
with Sample assays of 2.54% Cu
By Jabulani Leffall
In the late nineteenth century Judge DeWitt Bisbee put up funds for the Copper Queen mine in Arizona and eventually got a city named after him.
Today Teryl Resources Corporation (TSX.V: TRC) Chief Executive John Robertson believes his latest hunches may be just as good.
But instead of a municipality bearing his surname, Robertson – encouraged by positive results from soil samples on Teryl’s Gold Hill property in Bisbee, Arizona – hopes merely to increase revenue and market capitalization for Teryl through further exploration.
It helps that Teryl is now mining in a stretch of desert foothills that once yielded approximately $1 billion in copper.
After a copper boom in the last half of the 20th century, Phelps Dodge Corporation discontinued mining operations 32 years ago in the Warren, Arizona-suburb of Bisbee around the famous Lavender Pit, where the Copper Queen became a mining icon.
The Lavender Pit is now little more than a tourist attraction, but Robertson says existing infrastructure along with excellent geophysical anomalies and geochemical copper values in the zone will go a long way. Just four miles southwest of the original site, Robertson thinks there is reason enough to feel confident about future prospects as Teryl drills its first hole starting in December and continuing in 2008.
Assays up to 2.54% copper were located on the Gold Hill proposed drill locations.
“It’s still a very hot area,” said Robertson. “When you talk about an area that yielded one of the richest copper deposits in history, it’s an exciting proposition to see what we can make of it along with our other holdings in gold and other minerals.”
British Columbia-based Teryl Resources spreads its risk considerably well through a JV project in silver mining in northern British Columbia, a formidable gold joint venture with Kinross in Alaska and modest revenue from oil and gas businesses in Texas and Kentucky.
For the foreseeable future, however, Gold Hill is where the firm will focus a good deal of attention as well as raising capital of about $1 million to unearth what it believes to be a large disseminating deposit of both copper and gold.
The Gold Hill Mine, which got its name from a modicum of gold extracted from sediment scattered throughout the area, includes nearly 249 acres on which there are about14 patented mining claims. There are even physical indicators for where miners might want to look, or have a shot at continuing to excavate, in the form Old Shallow placer diggings throughout the property as well as small shafts, pits and cuts.
Further, Teryl’s geologist believes the geological characteristics of Gold Hill to be similar or at least comparable to the Carlin Trend, just outside of Elko, Nevada. That gold mining district, which is 5 miles in width and stretches for more than 40 miles long, has produced more gold than the any other mining district in the United States. It also resembles the Witwatersrand System, a formation of sedimentary hills in South Africa comprised of quartz, shales and other mineral conglomerates, according to Teryl.
Diversified Holdings
While visions of tons of copper and other minerals that could come out of Gold Hill makes Bisbee, the “it,” property for Teryl right now, the company also sees golden opportunities through its four-site portfolio of advanced gold properties in Alaska’s Fairbanks Mining District, where Teryl is one of the principle landowners.
Its Gil project, on the eastern-most edge of the district in Fairbanks, is a JV with Kinross Gold Corporation (TSX:K; NYSE:KGC) where Teryl gets 20 percent to Kinross’ 80 percent. Just northwest of the Gil property are the Fish Creek Claims, where Teryl has optioned 50 percent optioned from Linux Gold Corp. (OTC BB:LNXGF). Rounding out the portfolio are Stepovich Claims, from which Teryl will get 10% in net profits from Kinross and the West Ridge property, which Teryl owns outright.
Between Gold Hill and the Alaska holdings, Robertson believes he has a good chance of a “pay-dirt” extraction from one of the many claims. With Gold poised to fetch as much as $1,000 per ounce and resource demands for copper and oil in India and China increasing, a good dig could pay dividends for Teryl.
Robertson and his management team believe that at the very least leveraging what it can from mining targets will garner attention from investors and at best will give Phillips Dodge or Kinross Gold the notion of either buying out claims or acquiring Teryl as a whole.
As junior resource concerns go, Teryl’s stock is in solid shape, seeing modest gains Since September and leveling off as the year comes to a close – now pushing a new price ceiling of twenty-five cents per share.
Shares of Teryl as of December 6 were trading at 21 cents per share, seven cents off a 52-week high of 18 cents but up by more than 30 percent from a 52-week low of 13 cents.
With about 40 million shares outstanding (fully diluted), Robertson says he would definitely like to see more liquidity pumped into the stock, with the price ideally getting up above a dollar.
“I’ll definitely be happy when I see a dollar-plus,” he said. “The thing about this business that you have to remember is that when you drill a hole and come up solid assays, your fortunes can change in a New York minute.”
This article is intended for information purposes only, and is not a recommendation to buy or sell the equities of any company mentioned herein. It is based on sources believed to be reliable, but no warranty as to accuracy is expressed or implied. The opinions expressed in the article are those of the author except where statements are attributed to individuals other than the author, in which case the opinions are those of the individual to whom they are attributed.
