Riddle

Riddle Project – New Rare Earths Prospect

Riddle is a “frontier” rare earth exploration project. It is frontier not because of its location, which is less than an hour’s drive from the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, but because this a new style of mineralization in a geological setting that has hitherto been overlooked in Canada.

Mineral title at the Riddle Project is held with nine claims totalling 2,137 hectares situated on crown land. Five claims are under option from two different owners through option-to-purchase agreements that have a four-year term and an ultimate buy-out price of $100,000 each. The remaining claims were acquired by Gitennes through staking.

Location

The Project is situated 17 km west-southwest of Summerland, BC. Access is by forestry service roads developed in the 1970’s and recently extended to access stands of pine-beetle kill. The area is crown land.

Previous Work

Claims were staked in the area and explored during the 1970’s for uranium as part of a large regional programme. Seven core holes were drilled in 1979 with negative results. Development of uranium resources is not permitted in British Columbia, and Gitennes is working four to five kilometers away from any of the reported occurrences of anomalous bedrock radioactivity.

Portions of the current property were re-staked in 2000 for gold. A small amount of drilling was done in the southeastern corner of the property, but no gold was found. It was during this time that a visiting geologist reported anomalous rare earth values from samples taken at the site of current interest. This was followed by a programme of geochemical sampling and a day’s worth of back hoe trenching, mostly as a sideshow to the larger gold project. Results were not encouraging and the option was dropped.

Geology

The project area has little outcrop being covered by extensive overburden in the form of ablation till and gravel. Based upon regional mapping by Neil Church the area is known to be underlain by Tertiary-aged (48 to 53 million years old) Marron Formation alkaline volcanic rocks, sitting unconformably upon Cretaceous and older granitic rocks. The Marron Formation units are a sequence of phonolite flows and tuffs passing upwards into trachyte or trachyandesite flows, ash-flow tuffs, tuff with lesser grit and mudstone. Outcrops of polymictic conglomerate are reported just several hundred metres north of the area of current interest. In the western and southern areas of the property highly feldspathic, porphyritic syenite of the Coryell intrusive suite and related dykes outcrop. These are considered to be an intrusive equivalent to the Marron volcanic rocks as they are similar in age and composition.

Mineralization

Mineralization outcrops in a small 5 by 4 metre area known as the “Road Showing” and also as blocks of angular float found along the old logging road network up to 350 metres southeast and 800 metres west and southwest of the “Road Showing”. At the Road Showing the mineralization is as steeply-dipping, thin lenses of finely laminated tuffaceous sediment and lapilli tuff within phonolite flows. The tuffs are impregnated with purple fluorite, celestite (strontium sulphate) and other strontium-barium minerals. Minor hematite and magnetite is present as well as traces of malachite after chalcopyrite. South of the Road Showing mineralized boulders have been found that include highly altered angular (fault?) breccia that is mineralized with celestite and cut by fluorite veins. West and southwest of the Road Showing dozens of boulders and blocks up to one metre across are found. These often show layering defined by finely laminated celestite-fluorite material and coarser breccia or conglomerate. Fragments of laminated, mineralized material have been observed within these breccias.

The rare earth-bearing mineral has not been identified. Rare earth mineralization is characterized by “Light Rare Earths” as illustrated in the following analytical results:

All analyses were determined by Acme Analytical Laboratories in Vancouver. Rare earths were determined by ICP-MS following a lithium borate fusion (Acme method code 4B03). Barium and strontium were determined by X-Ray Fluorescence. Heavy rare earth concentrations are low, totalling less than 100 ppm, as are thorium, uranium, zirconium and yttrium.

The high strontium and barium levels are very unusual in this geological setting, as is the high fluorite content (not easily determined by routine geochemical analysis but visually estimated to exceed 5% in some samples). The barium, strontium and fluorine minerals are in themselves not the objective of Gitennes’ work at Riddle, but are seen to be indicators of a very special geological environment and a strong pathfinder to finding additional mineralization.

Deposit Type

Mineralization at Riddle is probably related to the early Tertiary alkaline igneous activity. It is dangerous to speculate at such an early stage, but guidance might be found in the styles of mineralization found at similar-aged centres such as Bear Lodge in Wyoming, Mountain Pass in California or the Gallinas Mountains of New Mexico.

Exploration – Q3 2011

Work at Riddle was undertaken during August and September. Exploration activities included:

1. Reconnaissance prospecting, mapping and sampling of areas along logging roads;
2. Establishing a small orientation grid on the “Road Showing”;
3. Mobile Metal Ion samples (“MMI”) samples were collected instead of conventional soils. This method was chosen due to the presence of ice-contact modified drift and ablation till of highly variable thickness. It is thought that the dry climatic conditions of the hot Okanagan summers makes for ideal conditions to draw metallic ions to the surface during periods of low rainfall and high evaporation;
4. Rock sampling of “Road Showing”;
5. Attempted to re-locate old drill platforms and some of the outcrops mapped by earlier workers;
6. Mineralogical analyses of hand samples using PIMA followed by some thin section microscopy.

This work is very preliminary in nature but serves to guide future programmes. Results of the MMI sampling in particular where very encouraging and could serve as a very useful tool in future programmes.

Next steps at Riddle should include a detailed airborne magnetometer survey, expanded grid-controlled MMI soil sampling, renewed efforts to re-located old drill pads and detailed mapping of reported outcrop areas. This will likely be followed by trenching before diamond drilling is considered.