Alba Minerals Ltd. (“Alba”) (TSX – Venture: AA / Frankfurt: A117RU / OTC: AXVEF) is pleased to highlight the Lyons Property which features 9 historic mines. The Property is 19 km from the La Sal Complex operated by Energy Fuels Inc. where they are currently running a test mining program targeting vanadium.
The Lyons Property is located in Montrose County, Colorado and abuts the Utah-Colorado border. It consists of 144 lode claims with an area of 2975.04 acres (1204 hectares). The claims are adjacent to Colorado Highway 90, which is an extension of Utah Highway 46 that changes designation at the state line. The property is accessible via 4-wheel drive roads off of the highway.
This property has seen extensive exploration and development work, which began in 1913 and has been intermittent since that time. The major amount of mining occurred in the 1950s. The primary commodity of interest historically has been uranium. Vanadium was also recovered as a byproduct and sometimes as the primary element depending on demand at the time (Carter and Gualtieri, 1965).
Pre-1946 vanadium production from the La Sal Creek district, of which the Lyons property is a part, is estimated at 11,440 tonnes containing 220,788 kg of V2O5 (approximately 1.9% V2O5) (Chenowith, 1981). Nine mines are shown within the Lyons claim block on the geologic map of the La Sal Quadrangle (Carter and Gualtieri, 1965).
Figure 2 – A portion of the geologic map of the La Sal quadrangle showing the locations of the nine mines within the Lyons Property. Available vanadium-uranium ratios for the various districts in the quadrangle report 6.3 : 1 in La Sal. (To view in the full-size image, please click here)
Several of the mines were discussed in detail in the text of the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) report and Table 1 is a listing of the U3O8 and V2O5 grades and their approximate ratios for each mine discussed by Carter and Gualtieri (1965) up through the end of the study (1956).
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