Windermere and Ruby Prospect

MDL 381 (hereafter know as Windermere) is located approximately 18 km northwest of Ravenshoe, in the Silver Valley locality, North Queensland. Windermere is approximately 88 km south-south-west of Cairns and can be accessed from Silver Valley Road via property tracks.

The Windermere deposit is located at the northern end of the MDL, close to the western bank of the Wild River.

Previous work has interpreted the Windermere mineralisation as a series of tabular lenses of limestone altered skarn mineralisation, with a magnetic north outcrop trend, and generally steep easterly dip with individual lenses were up to 800 metres long.

Initial modelling of the Windermere and Deadman’s Gully deposit was undertaken by Optiro in 2013 based on drilling undertaken by Consolidated Tin Mines (CSD) in 2011. Earlier exploration work was undertaken by Otter Exploration work but was not used in the development of the MRE. The CSD MRE utilised tin (Sn) as the controlling elemental parameter with Metal Equivalents (ME) calculated for iron (Fe). 

A total of two elements, tin, and iron were estimated by ordinary kriging in Datamine, into the parent block sizes. Blocks were estimated using parameters derived from the KNA and hard boundaries were utilised between each domain. Three search passes were used to estimate all the elements. The majority of blocks within all domains were estimated in the first search pass and all blocks were estimated by the third pass.

Windermere is another tin resource, which like Gillian, is believed to have the tin as finely dispersed cassiterite in an iron rich matrix. Metallurgical test work to date has been limited to XRD analyses on selected samples, which indicated the cassiterite was fine and dispersed due to lack of detection of cassiterite crystals. It is proposed that this resource would be suitable for the same processing route as the Gillian ore and could be processed concurrently.

Determination of further magnetite at depth beneath weathered colluvium to determine if magnetite occurrences are feeder structures for Mount Ruby or leads to another Skarn deposit.