Geology and mineralization of the Limousine Butte gold deposits, White Pine County, Nevada

Nevada Pacific Gold’s Limousine Butte Project is located in unsurveyed Townships
22 and 23 North, Range 61 East, on the west flank of the Cherry Creek Range,
White Pine County, Nevada. Throughout the last forty years multiple exploration
companies have explored and drilled several zones of low-grade gold and copper mineralization
in the project area. Nevada Pacific Gold (NPG) acquired the property
through claim staking in 1997 and began compiling all historical, geological, and geochemical
data produced over this forty year period.
Gulf Minerals identified a porphyry/skarn type magnetic signature in Butte Valley
with a high-level aeromagnetics survey in the mid-1950’s. The Newmont/New Jersey
Zinc Joint Venture first drilled the discovery in 1962. Bear Creek Mining later calculated
the porphyry to contain a resource of 50 million tons of 0.6% copper which is
covered by a 1,500 to 2,500 foot thick post-mineral slide block. Relogging of several
holes in the porphyry system suggests a later gold system overprint crosscutting and
replacing skarn-altered sedimentary rocks and hosted within argillized rhyolite. The
best intercept in both the porphyry and related skarn consisted of 701 feet of 0.019
opt gold in drill hole BV-10. A small gold resource of 91,000 ounces was produced
from shale and jasperoid hosted dolomites at the Golden Butte mine by Alta Gold
from 1987–1989. Between the Golden Butte mine and the Butte Valley porphyry, several
gold anomalies are present in the Paleozoic carbonate and clastic rocks that
range in age from the Devonian Pilot Shale to the Pennsylvanian Ely Limestone.
Exploration drilling and geologic mapping in the Golden Butte mine area (Resurrection
Ridge) has shown that gold mineralization was formed along the edge of an
Eocene volcanic rock-filled graben or possible caldera margin (Branham, 2002). The
graben contact fault is a “feeder fault” containing high-grade gold (60 feet of 0.249 opt)
at the shale-dolomite graben fault contact. The strike extension of this fault, and the
alteration associated with it, are at least six miles long.
On April 1, 1999, Newmont Mining Corporation and NPG entered into a joint
venture agreement to explore the Limousine Butte property. By June of 2002 Newmont
had spent $1,048,220 on identifying and drilling twenty-one sedimentary rockhosted
gold targets within a 25 mi2 area. Drilling by Newmont and NPG, to date, has
defined six oxide gold inventories containing 39.4 million tons grading 0.016 opt gold
for a total of 620,000 ounces of gold.