Work History

Staked as Hip cl 1-4, Toe cl 1-4, Elbow cl 1-8 and Butte cl 1-8 (YA10506) in Aug/77 by Baltic Drilling Ltd, which carried out geological mapping and geochemical rock and regional soil sampling in 1978.
Mattagami Lake Mines Ltd staked KZ cl 1-24 (YA55713) immediately to the west in July/81 and carried out geochemical stream sediment and soil sampling at that time. In 1982, the company carried out geological mapping, geochemical soil sampling on an expanded grid and minor hand pitting. Mattagami's interest was acquired by Noranda Exploration Company Ltd later that year.
Restaked as Sandy cl 1-4 (YC88053) in Jul/96 by A.E. Angus. Canadian United Minerals Inc staked Chey cl 1-28 (YC04051) to the south in Apr/97; staked Monster cl 1-19 (YC04079) on the east side of the Dempster Highway at the same time; and restaked the occurrence as Chey cl 29-58 (YC06953) in Mar/98.
Restaked as Baltic cl 1-4 (YC20761) in Jun/2001 by Cash Minerals Ltd, which also restaked the Hip cl 1-2 (1.5 km to the south) as Baltic cl 5-6 (YC20785) before carrying out propsecting, geological mapping, hand trenching and geochemical sampling.

Capsule Geology

Moderate to coarsely crystalline barite, as float and in outcrop was discovered by Baltic geologists and occurs as small (3 to 8 cm) pods adjacent to chert nodules, in veins up to a metre wide and as patches up to 1.5 m wide in pods and veins of recrystallized calcite within Upper Cambrian to Lower Devonian grey and buff-weathering dolomite and limestone of the Bouvette Formation.
Regional mapping carried out by Baltic identified additional baritic float occurrences on the hillsides, on the opposite side of the Dempster Highway, immediately east of this occurrence and approximately 10 km to the southeast in the vicinity of Minfile Occurrence 116G 062. Results of regional reconnaissance soil sampling carried out at this time were not reported.
Mattagami's work was focused on a vegetative kill zone approximately 2.4 km west of the occurrence location, which was discovered during regional exploration for uranium. Stream silt samples collected in the area returned values up to 2600 ppm Zn, 110 ppm Mo and 11 000 ppm Ba, although later resampling returned low values possibly due to inclusion of metal rich percipitates with the original samples.
Upper Devonian and Carboniferous black shales, black, organic-rich, pyritiferous (1-3% pyrite) cherts, black fetid limestones, and interbedded laminated to thinly bedded, black cherts and fissile, grey, cherty shales of the Ford Lake assemblage underlie the area surrounding the kill zone. Soil sampling of this area revealed widespread, weakly anomalous Ag values (up to 13 ppm) across the grid which were coincident with elevated levels of Zn (1300 ppm) and Cu (170 ppm) in in the northwest corner of the sampled area. Values for Pb were consistently low (< or = 12 ppm) and hand soil pits excavated upslope of the kill zone failed to determine an anomalous source. In fact testing of the soil profile in the pits revealed no significant increase in metal values with depth and talus float from the area returned only weakly anomalous silver values (4 ppm), suggesting that any enrichment in the area is surficial in nature and not the result of a mineralized source at depth.
Work by Cash Minerals in 2001 showed that the barite showings that comprise this occurrence are strongly strata-controlled and preferrentially hosted by an interval that occurs between 300 and 100 m from the stratigraphic top of the Bouvette Formation. Hand trenching revealed three zones of barite mineralization occurring as northerly dipping lenses or tabular bodies that are thought to be up to 6 m thick and 70 m in length. No sulphide minerals are present in the barite and character specimens collected from the two more westerly bodies contained 97.6 to 98.5% barite (57.4 to 58% Ba) with specific gravities ranging between 4.41 and 4.56 g/cm³.