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Tracker - January 15, 2024: PJX narrows the focus for the Dewdney Trail Sullivan Two Hunt
 PJX Resources Inc announced on January 15, 2024 that it has discovered mineralized zinc-lead-silver outcrop at its Dewdney Trail project in southeastern British Columbia that is lower grade than the massive sulphide boulders it reported in October 2023 (ie 6%-7% combined zinc-lead versus 7%-12%) which led me to assign Bottom-Fish Spec Value rating in Tracker October 17, 2023. Nevertheless, this is a major development which boosts the chances of a world class discovery later this year when drilling gets underway in May. Although before 2020 PJX was very much focused on the Sullivan Two Hunt, in recent years it has focused on a structural concept it calls the Vulcan gold belt which CEO John Keating believes has potential for intrusion related gold and copper systems as well as sediment hosted copper deposits. PJX has assembled two property groups surrounding historical unexplained placer workings which it calls the Eddy-Zinger-Parker and Dewdney Trail projects. In what amounts to an act of serendipity PJX has ended up going full circle back into a major new Sullivan Two Hunt.
During the summer of 2023 PJX began field work on the recently acquired Estella claim within the Dewdney Trail property where a small high grade zinc-lead-silver vein deposit was once mined. The crew was investigating porphyry style rock on the eastern slope of the valley across from the Estella Mine when it began to find sulphide boulders within the talus debris at the base of the slope. These assayed 4%-7% zinc, 1%-3% lead, and silver as high as 18 g/t. Even better, the massive sulphide rocks included a wide range of other metals also found in the Sullivan deposit such as copper, gold, cobalt, indium and cadmium. The rocks were very magnetic courtesy of the iron sulphide pyrrhotite which also makes up large parts of the Sullivan deposit. Most important of all, when cut the rocks revealed bedding and fragmental textures typical of a marine exhalative setting, and very different from the Estella vein mineralization across the valley. When Sullivan Two hunters saw the rocks they didn't buy stock in the market, but lined up to buy a series of private placements in the $0.09-$0.11 range that boosted working capital from $500,000 to $2.9 million, and fully diluted to 217 million shares. This story has had very limited circulation outside a community of experts, which may be why the stock trades like just about every other beaten up bottom-fish.
But the experts had two hard questions which may explain their reluctance to pound the table beyond having failed at every prior Sullivan Two Hunt. One was, given that the Estella Mine operated from 1951-1967, yielding 109,518 tonnes of 9.0% zinc, 4.7% lead and 58.4 g/t silver, and the century long obsession with finding Sullivan Two in southeastern British Columbia, if another sediment hosted exhalative style deposit outcropped in the area, why had it not already been found? The answer turned out to be a quirk of geology. The mountain ridge on the eastern side of the valley consists of Precambrian stratigraphy about 1.47 billion years old that dips to the northeast. The upper exposed part of the 500 metres of vertical relief was uninteresting. The lower part, however, turns out to be obscured by a syenite porphyry dyke that crosscut the older stratigraphy about 145 million years or so ago. Keating's crew was chasing this dyke in the hope that it might be part of a mineralized porphyry system. The Sedex style massive sulphide boulders in the talus at the base of the slope were a head scratcher because they could not see what horizon they might have spilled from. Closer examination revealed that the porphyry dyke was oriented such that it cloaked the lower part of the slope like a veneer, though erosion had created small local windows hard to spot from which the massive sulphide boulders had spilled. The crew tried to find the upslope outcropping windows before snow shut things down, but they failed. A 1.6 km by 600 m magnetic anomaly underlies this mountain ridge, and in the Sullivan model this would be due to the pyrrhotite within the deposit, for whose presence the talus boulders were evidence. The unfortunate part of this failure was that PJX might have to guess where to start drilling in 2024, which was the other hard question: what is the scale and location of the talus boulder source?
As it turns out, the crew had not entirely failed to find outcropping sulphides. Somewhat to the north of where the mountain ridge would have shed the magnetic massive sulphide boulders the crew found outcropping sphalerite (zinc sulphide) mineralization which also exhibited bedding but lacked the magnetism of the talus boulders. When the assays came back they were not quite as good as the talus boulders, but good enough to qualify as either mineralization peripheral to the hydrothermal vent, or perhaps a younger or older exhalation. The fact that the non-magnetic outcrop occurs where the magnetic intensity begins to fade was a bonus. This outcropping zone may not be the heart of Sullivan Two, but it is an excellent location to begin drilling and start to sort out the folding history of this mountain ridge.
What was the market reaction? The stock managed to close down $0.005 at $0.165 on paltry volume of 136,300 shares. The market either did not understand the importance of this news or is too despondent to take it seriously. Until today the risk was that PJX either delayed drilling until late summer while the crew searched for the dyke windows, exposing the market to fire season closure risk, or drilled lots of blind holes into the magnetic anomaly without hitting anything qualifying as a discovery. The news today does not mean a discovery is assured, but if Sullivan Two lurks inside this mountain ridge across the valley from the old Estella vein, PJX will find it a lot quicker than would otherwise have been possible.
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