Cerro Blanco Gold Project

Details

The Cerro Blanco gold project is located in southeast Guatemala approximately 160 kilometers by road from the capital, Guatemala City. It is located in the Jutiapa Department, approximately nine kilometers west of the border with El Salvador. The nearest town to the project is Asunción Mita, a community of about 20,000 people approximately ten kilometers from the project.

Previous owners invested approximately US$230 million into the project (US$60 million of which went into the Mita Geothermal project). Existing infrastructure includes portals, declines, and multiple Alimak vent rasies. Three kilometers of underground development has been completed including limited trial mining.

Since acquisition Bluestone has updated the geology and reinterpreted the deposit which was a result of an extensive structural mapping and re-logging exercise along with a 35,000 meter drill program. The work demonstrated that the high grade veins are surrounded by a mineralized envelope that comes to surface.

Geology

The Cerro Blanco gold project is a classic hot springs-related, low sulphidation gold-silver deposit. Mineralization occurs within composite veins of chalcedony, quartz, adularia and calcite. The veins cut intensely-altered volcaniclastic rocks, limestones and sandstones.

The current resource occurs under a small hill and has a footprint of about 400 meters by 800 meters and occurs between elevations of 300 meters and 500 meters above sea level. It occurs at the south end of a north-south corridor of hydrothermal alteration, about five kilometers long and one kilometer wide. This corridor has several other gold targets under investigation now. The current resource comprises both high and low angle veins of colloform chalcedony, adularia, dark grey bands of silver sulphides, and bladed calcite replacement texture. These textures are all classic indicators of boiling fluids, the type that deposit gold and silver in modern geothermal districts.