EXCLUSIVE: Legendary Geologist Stu Averill At PDAC Talks Tower's Latest Gold Discovery: Is It The Best He's Ever Seen?

Tower Resources, Ltd TWRFF on March 1, announced it has discovered a second gold zone, which it named Thunder, at the head of its central train, while drilling an inaugural four holes, totaling 1403.1 meters at its Rabbit North property in Kamloops, B.C. The company previously made a gold discovery at its Lightning zone on the same property. 

Of the four holes, three showed impressive mineralization. “The three Thunder Zone intersections traced the mineralization for 200 m along strike and, remarkably, down to a depth of nearly 400 m (~1200 feet) below surface, leaving it wide open at both ends and down dip. The mineralized core sections vary in length from approximately 30 m to 130 m; most importantly, the longest intercept is also the deepest and most strongly mineralized,” the gold miner said.

Importantly, Tower's cores showed visible gold, which is rare.

Geologist and director of Tower, Stu Averill, who also founded Overburden Drilling Management (ODM), sat down with Benzinga at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada conference (PDAC) in Toronto recently to discuss Tower’s most recent discovery, while also providing background information on his impressive history as a geologist.

Tower’s Latest Discovery

"The first core from Thunder, especially the deep core from Hole 042, is the most attractive of any gold discovery that I have been involved in during my 50+ years of mineral exploration. The evident blossoming of the mineralization with depth is what every geologist dreams of, but rarely experiences,” Averill said in the March 1st release.

The comment garnered widespread attention, not only because of the implications surrounding what that means for this junior miner but, more importantly, because of who said it. The geologist, who helped to expose the massive Bre-X scandal, which forced Canada to regulate professional geology and the securities exchange to implement the National Instrument 43-101, is renowned in his field and his words are trusted in the industry.

“It is true, you know, basically I’m not saying that it’s the best core I’ve ever seen –it's the best core I've ever seen in a discovery that I've been involved in,” Averill told Benzinga. “I’ve been involved in a couple of large gold discoveries –Casa Berardi and Rainy River and a number of small ones,” he said, adding “the key here is we have something to compare it to, okay, we have a known that is 400 meters away –the same type of deposit, the same host rock, but not nearly as mineralized, and by mineralization I mean the sulfides because the gold here is in the pyrite.”

New Gold, Inc NGD acquired Rainy River in 2013 after Averill played a leading role in discovering gold in that district. When asked to compare the discovery at Rainy River to those at Tower’s Rabbit North, Averill said, “at Rainy River you’d only rarely see visible gold, like at Lightning (Tower’s first discovery on its Rabbit property),” adding “compared to those two, Thunder looks better.”

But it’s not just gold that Tower found during its most recent program. The company also found copper in hole 42, which Ken Hoffman, co-Head of the EV battery materials research group and senior expert at McKinsey & Company said, during his keynote speech at PDAC on Sunday, will be the most critical metal for the global electrification effort over the next decade.

When asked about the potential for copper, indicated through the discovery of chalcopyrite at Tower’s Thunder zone, Averill said, “there’s definitely going to be some copper, especially in hole 42 as you get deeper, and that’s where we had the deeper and longer intersection," adding, “I could say something else there, but I’m not going to.”

TWRFF Price Action: Tower Resources was trading down 3.3% at $0.28 at last check.

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