Rio Alto Mining has announced drilling results from 18 reverse circulation (RC) holes in and around the Calaorco pit, which is at the La Arena gold oxide mine in Peru.
The company had proclaimed earlier, an 11,700 m RC drill program at the Calaorco pit. It has planned to increase the drilling program from 3,000 m to 14,700 m, totaling 55 holes, depending on the results received from the initial 32 holes. Rio Alto will offer the updated resource model for the Calaorco pit in the fourth quarter of 2011. The company is anticipating that this program will discover new regions to examine and to develop the resources and outline new resource blocks and bring positive results to the resource block categorization.
The results from 14 holes, 3,755 m in total were reported by the company in April 2011. The results from additional 18 holes, totaling 9,029 m are reported in this announcement. The company has encountered gold mineralization in all the holes except one hole, beyond the recent mining cutoff grade in and outside of the present pit design. Two RC drilling rigs are operating at La Arena. Rio Alto has planned to bring in four diamond drill rigs at the site by June end.
Geochemical sampling and surface mapping has discovered Astrid, which is a latest target around 500 m north of Calaorco. This new target has the same geochemical and geological features as Calaorco. Rio Alto has planned to run 20 Km of ground magnetic and IP lines at Astrid to find the targets.