The BarkerLetter

Newsflash: Rochester intersects 4.28 grams gold and 1,405 grams silver at Santa Fe.

January 31, 2008

DATELINE - Santa Maria del Oro, Nayarit, Mexico

Rochester’s Minas Real gold project is a two-hour drive through the dusty hills behind the popular tourist destination of Puerto Vallarta, and near the inland town of Santa Maria del Oro. 

It comprises a mill, some historic workings, and up to 26 epithermal vein systems ranging to 40 meters in width along four kilometers of strike.

You could write the backstory to this project on the back of a napkin! Two years ago Alfredo Parra, a former general manager for Mexican mineral giant Industrias Penoles,  decided to look for gold in a largely unstaked region of the Sierra Madre mountains, a few hours from Guadalahara. He focused his search in areas where the place names suggested historic mining had occured, eventually bushwhacking his way over the empty hills with his son to find a partially-hidden mining adit.

The adit yielded samples of up to 14.55 grams of gold and 760 grams silver!

Staking and the construction of a 200 tpd mill followed soon after, along with the construction of a road which - fortuitously - cut into a trio of undiscovered but gold-silver rich vein systems in the vicinity of the workings.  Ah, serendipity … I love it!

Today, the principals of Rochester Resources Ltd. believe they are looking at a potential +40 million ounce gold equivalent resource on two properties there, the Mina Real and Santa Fe. That’s not bad for a project that started scant years ago with a leisurely stroll in the mountains. 

The physical characteristics of Rochester’s project lands are depicted more or less in the photo above. Probably all of those mountains host some extent of gold and silver mineralization. Yet this area of Mexico has not enjoyed the kind of mineral exploration that has unfolded over the past 15 years in northern Mexico.

At least not yet!

The staking rush to the north stemmed from a government decision in the ’80s to shift people from overpopulated Mexico City to less crowded areas of the country. It’s why regional towns like Hermosillo in Sonora have become cities in their own right in recent years.

Of course all those people needed jobs. So the government updated its mining code and let the foreigners in.  The massive growth in exploration expenditures followed in states like Sonora, Chihuahua, and Durango.

I think we’ll see the same thing occur in the coming years in the southern reaches of the mineral rich Sierra Madres, precisely in those areas where Rochester’s project lands are located.

But you wouldn’t think it to look at Santa Maria del Oro, the dusty town which is Rochester’s neighbour. It’s little more than a collection of abode buildings surrounding what looks to me like an unexcavated pyramid. However, if you drive a little further you’ll find a brand new $4 million hotel which looks like it sprang right from the pages of Architectural Digest.

This intrigues me because I know that hotels like this do not just appear at random in Mexico. Cancun was not built by accident, nor was Acapulco or Huatulco. They exist thanks to the political will to build them, and the fact (no doubt!) that certain people in Mexico City owned the surrounding concessions and land titles and infrastructure. Nor were they built overnight. They were planned years ahead.

Tune in tomorrow for more details  ….

(Cont.)