Red Eagle Moves Toward 2015 Production at Santa Rosa in Colombia

By Kevin Michael Grace

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For over 500 years, the world has been enticed by Colombia’s gold. But for several decades, the South American nation has been so weakened by drug cartels and Marxist revolutionaries that foreign miners stayed out. As a result, Red Eagle Mining TSXV:RD CEO Ian Slater says, “Colombia hasn’t had modern exploration.” To him, this makes for opportunity without parallel.

“We created the company for Colombia,” Slater declares. “We have other projects. We have a private company [Black Eagle Mining] developing a metallurgical coal project in Alberta. We have Slater Mining TSXV:SLM in Kazakhstan. I’m on the Board of Miranda Gold TSXV:MAD, a project generator out of Nevada. They went into Colombia, and I went down with them. They acquired a lot of land and JVed them all out; that’s their business model.”

Santa Rosa: "We know everybody there; the mayor, police chief and army are all friendly."

Slater continues, “What we all thought was the best project in Colombia was called Pavo Real, and we optioned it [70% from Miranda] and created a new company. We did an IPO and raised $25 million a year ago.”

Pavo Real comprises 4,000 hectares in Tolima Department, 20 kilometres south of its capital, Ibaqué, 45 kilometres southeast of AngloGold Ashanti’s La Colosa gold project. “We had decent results there,” Slater says, “but the results of Santa Rosa were so much better we’ve been spending more of our time on it. We just finished a 10-hole program there, and the results will come out in July. There definitely is gold there. It’s just a matter of needing to do more work to get it right.”

Pavo Real was augmented in May with the Red Eagle agreeing to pay $510,000 to option 100% of Mina Vieja. “It’s actually an entire district, around 15 by 20 kilometers. We put four drillholes in Mina Vieja already, and the assays are pending. It was a brownfield copper mine, and it’s exciting. It was a producing mine in the 1970s. They only mined it for a few years and then left because of the troubles in Colombia and low copper prices. It’s been sitting there now for 40 years, and lots of ore is still there.”

After the option of Pavo Real, Red Eagle looked for a project it would wholly own. Santa Rosa was the result. It comprises 4,500 hectares in Antioquia Department, 70 kilometres northwest of its capital, Medellín. Slater reports, “In the first phase of drilling last summer, we made the San Ramon discovery. We just finished Phase 2 drilling. We issued the first couple of results, and were really happy with them. Half those results are out, and the other half will be out within a month.”

San Ramon assay results released June 26 included

• 0.71 grams per tonne gold over 34 metres
• 2.28 g/t over 35.5 metres

  (including 28.26 g/t over 1.5 metres)

• 1.08 g/t over 49 metres

  (including 11.7 g/t over 1 metre)

• 1.77 g/t over 11.1 metres
• 6.4 g/t over 4.8 metres

San Ramon assays released June 13 included

• 3.06 g/t over 66.9 metres
  (including 31.85 g/t over 6 metres)
• 1.96 g/t over 7 metres
  (including 22.1 g/t over 0.5 metres)
• 0.63 g/t over 34.6 metres

Phase 3 oxide drilling of 5,000 metres and at least 36 holes began at San Ramon June 24. “By the end of summer we’ll have 22,000 meters,” Slater says. “We just started our metallurgical work, and it’s come back positive; it was 85% recoveries. And what’s really interesting is the grade. We think the fire assays aren’t showing all the gold. So when you’re doing the bulk samples, you find out what is exactly in there, and with the fire assays we’re not. We’re just relooking at it now with the metallurgist on what kind of samples we need to do. Luckily, we found out before we sent any oxide drill core to the lab.

“We need to change the methodology we’re using to make sure we find that we get all the gold out of it. But it’s really promising because it’s been the most frustrating thing for us. When you look at the property, it was one of the biggest producing mines in Colombia 400 years ago, and they were sluicing the hillsides off, and some of these things are like a kilometer wide. We’ve mapped 60 of them so far, and we think they mined like 30 million tonnes of oxide back then. They’re just not going to do that for one gram [per tonne], 400 years ago, right? When we change the methodology here for sampling, I think the grades will really go up.”

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