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Team Work WorksBob Moriarty It's been a busy month for me. In the last month I've been to the Dominican Republic. Then I made a quick trip to Salt Lake City to drive up to a promising prospect in Idaho, then home for a few days, then off to London on my way to Rwanda. Kenya and Paris. A nice R&R followed Rwanda with Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert in gay Paris. Days later I was in Mali and then back home. I'm exhausted but I have seen some wonderful projects. My short trip to Idaho was made on behalf of Western Pacific Resources (WRP-V) WRP is a new company formed by the Vancouver based Gold Group of companies under the Simon Ridgeway umbrella. Warwick Smith is CEO and founder. He came up under the tutelage of Simon Ridgeway and worked in a variety of roles for the Gold Group for over ten years. He put together the brilliant team of Eric Sanderholm, President of WRP and Curt Everson, Exploration Manager.  Eric and Curt have been involved with the discovery or advancement of over a dozen major mines including Yanacocha, Mesquite, Lone Tree and Gold Quarry. They know a big deposit when they see it. Western Pacific is a new company that comes with no baggage, no rollbacks. Warwick and his team, and I want to emphasize team, wanted to start with something with real potential but with no JV or NSR dilution. The project I went to see is their primary focus even though they have three secondary projects in Nevada. They want to focus on Nevada even if Mineral Gulch, formerly the Black Pine Mine, happens to be located just inside the Idaho border. The Black Pine Mine has an interesting history. Gold was discovered in a mercury prospect in the late 1930s. There was a small open pit mine in the early 1950s. Noranda first explored it in the late 1980s before it was sold to Pegasus Gold. Under Pegasus it produced over 520,000 ounces of gold at about 2 g/t. Pegasus Gold had another mine in Montana called the Zortman Landusky Mine. They didn't want to do the reclamation work on it so they transferred their profitable assets into Apollo Gold run by the same management as Pegasus and put Pegasus into bankruptcy in 1998. No one was making money in 1998 mining 2-g/t material so Black Pine was shut down and the mill and equipment sold when Pegasus went belly up. Someone at some point has staked every inch in Nevada and the entire state has been drilled so it looks like Swiss cheese. The days of picking up a real prospect by staking are long since past. Mineral Gulch (Black Pine) is on what is now called the Bald Mountain/Long Canyon trend. But it's in Idaho. So everyone looking for good new projects in Nevada missed it. It was on another map. But Eric Sanderholm and Curt Everson literally took a ruler and extended the Bald Mtn/Long Canyon trend onto the map of Idaho and there was Black Pine. They picked it up for the cost of staking and vended it into the new Western Pacific Resources in exchange for shares. That was probably the best move I have seen made by a company in years. That's teamwork. Mineral Gulch produced over 520,000 ounces of gold in an 8-year period using a heap leach process. Sanderholm and Everson have identified a massive intrusive to the west of the project that appears to be the heat source driving the mineralization.  Mineralization seems to be the richest at the intersection of cross cutting structures. In our tour we could clearly see structures at 90-degree angles to one another. WRP will be concentrating on those cross cutting structures to define a new minable resource. Pegasus ignored the material containing carbon; it doesn't work in a heap leach, as the cyanide prefers it to gold or silver. That material would work in a flotation circuit. WPR management believes they should stockpile the material for processing down the road. They are looking for a minable heap leach resource right now. Western Pacific Resources carries no baggage. They are a young company operated out of an office with a lot of successful operations under their belt. The management is highly experienced. They have much of the old data from Noranda so can hit the ground running. The company has about 15 million shares and just under $2 million in the bank. I should be very disappointed if they don't come up with something interesting. WRP is an advertiser and as such we are biased. As always, the reader is cautioned that they get to keep all the profits or losses so bear the most responsibility for doing their own due diligence. Management is quite approachable and we encourage potential investors to contact the company for more details.
### Bob Moriarty 321gold Ltd |
