Yerington, Nevada

Overview

The Willow property is located approximately 65 km southeast of Reno and 13 km due west of Yerington, Nevada, in the Buckskin Mountain Range. Year-round access from Yerington along paved roads leads to well-maintained gravel roads that skirt the claims. A series of old drill roads provides good access to the entire property.

Willow (in blue below) was acquired in February of 2017 in an option agreement with Almadex Minerals. The Nev-Lorraine claims (in purple) are contiguous and wrap around the far southeast corner of Willow. Nev-Lorraine is subject to a separate lease agreement with private landowners signed in February 2018. The property is collectively known as Willow.

Willow occurs in the western portion of the historic Yerington Copper Camp. The property was explored in the 1960s to the early 1980s by Anaconda Mining, Bear Creek Mining and Conoco, who worked to identify a porphyry copper deposit analogous to the nearby Yerington Mine which was in production at the time. Each of these companies drilled a series of holes on what is now the Willow property but concentrated several km west of where Abacus is drilling.

Four porphyry copper deposits and numerous Cu-Fe and Cu-Au skarns have been identified to date in the Yerington camp. The porphyry deposits are Yerington, Ann Mason, Bear and MacArthur. The main skarns are Pumpkin Hollow and the former Mason Valley, Bluestone and Malachite Mines. Abacus believes that its work to date has identified the presence of a fifth porphyry in the camp, something that Anaconda and other companies were searching for in the 1970’s. This represents the first major discovery in over forty years, although the deposit still remains to be delineated with further drilling.

Willow is contiguous with the large property position to the east of Mason Resources, now a subsidiary of Hudbay. It contains the undeveloped Ann Mason porphyry copper deposit plus Blue Hill, which is considered to be a fault offset of Ann Mason. Hudbay released an updated PEA on Ann Mason in 2021 with a revised M&I resource of 2.2 billion tonnes at 0.34% Cu.

Directly to the east of Hudbay’s property are the three remaining known porphyry copper deposits held by Lion Copper and Gold (formerly Quaterra Resources). The main producer in the camp was the Yerington porphyry deposit, mined by Anaconda from 1952-1978. It contained approximately 162 MT of 0.6% Cu and produced 1.6 billion pounds of copper. Lion also controls the adjacent Bear and MacArthur porphyries. The Bear deposit contains > 500 MT of 0.4% Cu, while MacArthur has an M&I oxide resource of 159 MT at 0.212% Cu and was previously mined via an open pit. Lion initiated a PEA on MacArthur in December of 2017. In March of 2022, Lion announced that Rio Tinto had taken an option on the company’s Yerington assets.

Some of the earliest production at Yerington occurred from skarns. The Mason Valley, Bluestone and Malachite Mines produced approximately 3.8 Mt grading 1.5%--6.2% Cu from 1910-1931. These properties lie south of Ann Mason and are now also controlled by Hudbay.

The Pumpkin Hollow Skarn/Fe-oxide deposit is currently in production in the southeast corner of the camp. It is owned by Nevada Copper and contains a P&P resource of 572 MT at 0.4% Cu.