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This 22,378-hectare property covers desert highlands in Chile’s Region I and is centered about 130 kilometers southeast of the major port city of Iquique. Access is good, with the Pan-American highway passing 30 kilometers west of the property.
The Challacollo silver deposit is situated within a metallogenic belt that parallels the northern Chilean coastline and includes the Cerro Colorado porphyry copper deposit and the El Peñon epithermal gold deposit. This belt is marked by subduction-related magmatism and associated hydrothermal events which occurred some 50 to 65 million years ago. Intermediate to felsic volcanic rocks are widespread on the property and overlie significantly older, marine sedimentary formations. The volcanic formations and a large diorite sill that intrudes them are believed to be of the same general age as the above-mentioned magmatism. Silver mineralization on the property is hosted by a system of northeast- to north-trending epithermal quartz-carbonate-barite veins that also contain minor to trace amounts of Cu-Pb-Zn sulphides and gold. The largest of these veins is the Lolón Vein which is more than 3.5 kilometers in length and was previously mined underground for silver.
In 2010, a comprehensive program of geophysical surveying was conducted on the property, including an airborne magnetic and electromagnetic survey and a relatively deeply penetrating CSAMT survey. In addition, a rock sampling survey was completed over the claims which allowed a map to be produced that outlines zones of hydrothermal alteration along with geochemical anomalies for silver, lead and zinc. The fieldwork that was completed in 2010 has been used to identify a number of drilling targets that are separate from previously proposed targets that represented possible strike and depth continuations of the known mineralized bodies found along the Lolón Vein. A drilling program of approximately 2,000 meters was designed to investigate the recently identified targets which include vein structures running parallel to the productive Lolón Vein as well as a zone of skarn mineralization.
