The foremost exploration outfit operating in the famed Hedley Gold Basin in BC has announced the best assays the region has seen since the Nickel Plate Mine stopped producing gold over a decade ago.

Goldcliff Resource Corp’s (TSX.V:GCN) share price doubled at the end of December after reporting surprising assays from the Bonanza Trench on Panorama Ridge that included one metre grading 525 grams per tonne (15.311 oz per short ton), one metre grading 168 g/t (4.899 oz per short ton) and 1.5 metres grading 6.16 g/t (0.180 oz per short ton).

The company reported that the five metre sample interval had a weighted average of over four ounces gold per short ton – or 140.21 grams gold per tonne.

These results are significant to investors because they indicate that the successful lower grade deposit the company has been busy defining since 2000 also has some accompanying high-grade components.

According to Goldcliff’s President George Sanders, this model is also backed up by historical data from other past producers. The Nickel Plate mine is located just four kilometres from Panorama Ridge. Between 1904 and 1996, the mine yielded 2.5 million ounces of gold.

“We’ve always thought that there would be and should be Nickel Plate high-grade someplace on the property," said Sanders. “We’ve now found that high-grade. And the significance of it is a couple points – the first demonstrates that Panorama Ridge is the same geological beast as Nickel Plate Mountain which produced 2.5 million ounces."

Another important factor about this newly discovered high-grade area is that it occurs with continuity – not just in high-grade veins, but in widely disseminated strata bound gold bodies with “dip continuity".

Goldcliff had already proved this in 2006, with positive assays throughout the York-Viking Zone. At the time, the company reported, “Of all the 2006 holes, holes 26072 and 26073 are the highlights of the York-Viking zone. Hole 26073 is the farthest hole drilled to the southwest and contains an intersection of 1.49 grams per tonne (g/t) gold over 26.70 metres. Hole 26072 is the farthest hole drilled to the northeast and contains 2.04 g/t gold over 20.10 metres, with a high-grade intersection of 6.73 g/t gold over 4.10 metres."

Sanders makes another important observation about the deposit. “What we also know from Nickel Plate which is important for Panorama Ridge is they didn’t just have one high-grade bed – they had several. So these things are not singular, they do repeat themselves and sometimes fault offset or have other mineralized beds within the 200 meter sequence."

The Hedley Basin is a major regional geological feature and is – considering the importance and size of the now exhausted Nickel Plate deposit – relatively underexplored. The Hedley Basin covers some 1,000 square kilometres and is composed of Late Triassic Nicola Group sedimentary and volcanic rocks. According to the authors of Goldcliff’s 43-101 on the Panorama Ridge property, “The basin area, which is relatively under explored, contains rock units with world-class gold deposit potential."

One of those authors is Goldcliff’s Chairman, Leonard Saleken, who like the rest of Goldcliff’s team, has a history of involvement in Hedley gold exploration and production.

Saleken was exploration manager for a private exploration group in the mid-1980s. As a part of the team doing due diligence for a reverse takeover for Mascot Gold, they analysed the old Nickel Plate Mine data and examined all the stopes (areas from which ore has been extracted), and the high-grade beds that had been mined. They also observed the drilling and drifting that had been done, as well as the gold in the drill holes and drifts which – if they were near surface – would, as Sanders puts it, “make one heck of an open pit mine."

What they determined was that the mineralized sequence did indeed outcrop on top of Nickel Plate Mountain. Consequently, Mascot Gold went on to open the Mascot open pit mine, which produced approximately one million ounces gold – all this occurred four kilometres and in the same geological setting as is found at Panorama Ridge.

Director Paul Saxton was the Mascot Mine’s VP of Operations and was partly responsible for putting the mine in production , and Director Edwin Rockel worked for Saleken on the geological team – it was Rockel who was responsible for the geophysics in that part of the Hedley Basin.

“When it comes to the work we’ve done on Panorama Ridge – our guys were already there and what we were looking for and continue to be looking for and drilling with success is this thicker sequence of lower grade near surface open pitable material."

The Nickel Plate Mine’s high-grade underground production produced approximately 1.5 million ounces of gold with recovered grades averaging 13.94 g/t gold, at the Mascot open pit mine, another one million ounces of gold were mined with recovered grades averaging 1.98 g/t gold. Over the coming months, with a 10,000 metre drill program added to the 7,800 metres already completed, Goldcliff expects to prove up a new deposit of comparable size and grade to these two past producers.

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.