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Quito North
Overview
The Quito North project comprises 28 unpatented claims located in the Quito Mine district, 10 km south of Austin, Nevada. The land package covers the northeast corner of the Quito Lower-plate window encompassing 3,000 m of the northern projection of the Quito Mine mineralized structure, up to its intersection with the eastern terminus of the Jurassic-aged Johnson Canyon laccolith.
The mineralized structure is coincident with a broad open breached anticline along the western edge of the Birch Creek graben. This is reminiscent of the structural setting at many of the large Carlin-type gold deposits in Nevada including Pipeline, Cortez Hills, Goldstrike and Goldrush-Fourmile-Dorothy.
The area immediately south of the Johnson Canyon intrusive is known as Bleached Cliffs. Highly elevated arsenic, antimony, and low-grade gold at this location has been the impetus for limited exploration. Shallow drilling has intersected up to 0.04 oz/ton gold in Lower-plate limestones. This drilling provides proof of concept constituting potential leakage from a more substantial gold deposit at depth. Specifically, the target area is just outboard of a 200 m wide calc-silicate-hornfels skarn thermal areole that surrounds the intrusive.
The southern portion of the Quito North claims covers part of the Section 25 target area where trenching and shallow drilling encountered low-grade gold mineralization. In addition, the Bleached Cliffs and Section 25 areas are the locus of rhyolite dyke swarms that are altered and mineralized with elevated values in arsenic, antimony and gold. The southern boundary of the claim group is located 1 km north of the former Quito operating open pit mine. The geology of the Quito window is strikingly similar to the Cortez District, in particular the north end of the Goldrush deposit (Dorothy) where Barrick Gold is outlining a new high-grade gold zone, and the Bleached Cliffs target.
Quito hosted significant high-grade mineralization (+1 oz/ton gold). The bottom of the high-grade has not been found. Numerous occurrences of ore-grade mineralization are present throughout the district, in both Lower- and Upper-plate lithologies. As such, Quito has pedigree and represents a strong Carlin system of district scale. To date, drilling within the district has been mostly shallow and limited to the mine area.