Shield-Carissa at a Glance
The Shield-Carissa property is located in the South Pass Mining District, a parallel orogenic shear zone district located approximately 18 kilometers west of the Lewiston Project. This property’s early exploration work suggests the apex of another strongly mineralized shear zone and is less than 1 kilometer from the historic Carissa Mine that produced over 180,000 ounces of gold historically.
- >2,000 acres (809 hectares) of active BLM lode mining claims, which include two historic mines – the B&H and Shields mines
- Relevant Gold rock chip samples up to 4.8 g/t Au
- > 3 km of East-Northeast anastomosing mineralized shear zone, parallel to the historic Carissa Mine trend
- Production at the adjacent Carissa Mine is estimated at 200,000 oz Au
- Gold mineralization hosted in quartz-arsenopyrite veins and arsenopyrite replacement zones at shear contact with Miner’s Delight wallrock
- Significant chlorite-silica-sulfide-epidote alteration
- Strong arsenic anomalies in both rock and soil
Geology and Mineralization
The Shield-Carissa property lies at the southwest margin of the South Pass/Atlantic City mining district, largely bounded to the north by the Atlantic Fault. In the overall geological and structural framework of the South Pass granite-greenstone terrane, the property occurs in the zone where major D2 wedge-shaped shear zones juxtapose mafic volcanic rocks of the lower Miners Delight Formation against typical Miners Delight metagreywacke.
Historic Mining at the Carissa Mine
Historic mining was developed on small scales, at narrow widths, and largely confined to oxidized ores above the water table (<80 feet). Available data suggest that much of the strike length of a given shear-hosted vein system is anomalous in gold with localized steeply plunging high-grade ore shoots systematically occurring parallel to the trend and plunge of stretching lineations.
The deepest and best-documented gold mine is the Carissa Mine outside of South Pass city. The mine was developed down to a depth of 400 feet along five main levels along a shear zone with abundant gold-bearing quartz-arsenopyrite-pyrrhotite veins. A vertical long-section (Macfarlane report, 1995) of the Carissa Mine, parallel to the strike of the main ore zone is presented to the left.
Shield-Carissa News
