About Deep River, NC

EXPLORATION HISTORY
Although the Deep River prospect has no recorded gold production, a few shallow prospect pits scattered throughout the area show evidence of historic gold exploration activity. The area lies within 10 kilometers of the historic Robbins gold mining district. The first modern exploration in the area was conducted by Noranda Exploration from 1989 to 1991 and consisted of extensive shallow soil sampling, trenching, an airborne geophysical survey and the drilling of 20 shallow saprolite holes up to 45 m deep (545 meters in total) and 9 core holes up to 205 m deep (838 m in total). All of the holes were drilled in a limited area and tested only a small portion of the large (3 km by 1 km) gold anomaly. Results included long intervals of anomalous gold mineralization up to 0.5 g/t. Cyprus Minerals carried out a limited mapping, sampling and trenching program before terminating their work in mid-1994 without conducting any additional drilling. To date approx. US $700,000 has been spent in 1995 dollars exploring the property with only a small portion of the known area of alteration/mineralization having been drill tested.

GEOLOGY AND MINERALIZATION
The Carolina Slate Belt is a late Proterozoic to early Paleozoic province associated with the Appalachian orogeny which consists of a complex stratigraphy of metamorphosed volcanic, sedimentary and intrusive rocks. The Carolina Slate Belt hosts the two-million ounce Ridgeway gold deposit mined by Kennecott from 1988 to 1999, together with the Haile, Brewer and Barite Hill gold mines in South Carolina. Gold production in the Carolina slate belt ranked sixth in the United States in 1992. The geologic setting is similar to world-class districts for both gold and base metals. This region is thought to have major potential for containing large undiscovered deposits of gold and silver, as well as copper, lead, zinc, and molybdenum.

Rocks within the prospect area consist principally of meta-sediments and intermediate to acidic volcanic rocks and associated intrusive rocks. The prospect area is adjacent to a broad northeast trending contact between meta-sediments and volcanic rocks. Proximity to this contact is a common factor among the major gold deposits within the Belt.

Within the altered porphyry intrusions, gold mineralization is primarily associated with silica flooding and stockwork quartz veining in highly fractured and brecciated quartz-sericite pyrite (phyllic) zones. Gold mineralization in the meta-sediments is hosted primarily by zones of silicification and moderate sericitization and is limited to the margins of the porphyry intrusions. Alteration patterns generally parallel known intrusions, indicating that most of the intrusions are pre-mineralization. The overall alteration pattern may outline the sub-surface distribution of a larger intrusive which acted as a possible source of this large mineralizing system.

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