The Opulent Property is located at 39° 0’N 119° 01’ W, approximately 12 km east of Yerington in Lyon County. The property can be reached by road with a 4x4 vehicle. The property currently consists of 4 claims in Section 12, Township 13N, Range 26E, staked on BLM land with no surface impairments.
While there are numerous exploration workings in the Opulent Property area, there is little documentation of past exploration or mineralization in the public record. The claims cover the Gap Claims MRDS Showing (#10050853) and were sampled by J. Tingley on behalf of the Nevada Bureau of Mines & Geology in 1989. Minor copper production is reported from the property and NBMG Sample 4238, taken from the area of the copper showing, reported 1.5% Cu and 7.7 g/t Au. Silver Range examined, sampled and staked the property in March 2021.
The Opulent Property is underlain by intrusive rocks of inferred Jurassic age, part of the same suite that hosts the Yerington Copper Deposit, approximately 15 km west of the property. The intrusive rocks on the property are modal granites and a sample collected near the principal gold showing plots chemically as peraluminous trachyte. The granite is cut by a northeast-trending braided shear zone with multiple strands visible in in several locations. The main shear zone dips to the northwest between 50-800 and a subordinate shear dips to the southeast at 480 in one location. The shear zone has been explored in 6 adits and trenches along a 300 m strike length. The shear appears to diminish in strength to the northeast and is lost under cover to the southwest. The shears are dominantly pink and white clay-fraction gouge with subordinate iron-oxide-stained quartz veinlets. Both these and altered granite in the shear carry gold mineralization. Initial grab samples from shear zone material exposed in workings or in dump piles returned assays from trace to 37.2 g/t Au. A chip sample across a 1.5 m shear exposed in a working returned 2.88 g/t Au. A total of 24 samples were collected during the initial exploration program with six returning assays greater than 5 g/t Au.
Northwest of the gold showing, an east-west trending shear hosts copper mineralization with grab samples returning up to 10.85% Cu but little gold. The copper mineralization may predate the gold mineralization based on the differences in the strike of the host structure and rock geochemistry.
Silver Range is planning an exploration program to assess the size and tenor of the known mineralization at Opulent, and to locate additional gold-bearing structures. A first phase consisting of geological mapping, systematic sampling and soil geochemical surveys would be followed by horizontal loop electromagnetic field surveys to locate structures under cover.
