2 High grades lure mining majors.

• Author: Stewart, Nick
• Position: 5 hot Junior Mining Companies

Despite having acquired the Rainy River Project property 80 kilometres south of Kenora just two years ago, Rainy River Resources' 2006 exploration results have already caught the eye of a few potential suitors.

"This is a pretty serious project," says Nelson Baker, president.

"It's one that's caught the interest of several majors, who have said they would love to talk to us when we're ready"

When drilling between the property's 17 Zone and the Beaver Pond Zone, a relatively untouched area, the company turned up 5.42 grams of gold per tonne over 43 metres, with a core interval of 17.67 grams of gold per tonne over 9.50 metres.

This represented the best gold intersection turned up on the property to date. What's more, the breadth and style of visible gold within the interval indicated a distinct, separate mineralized zone, now called the ODM Zone. This discovery is hosted in the same three-kilometre gold trend as the 17 Zone.

Further drilling through the winter months on the ODM Zone turned up results such as hole NR06-107, which evidenced 22.6 metres grading 17.02 grams per tonne of gold, while NR06-111 has shown 23.5 metres grading 10.63 grams per tonne of gold.

Findings in the ODM Zone thus far have been above the 100-metre level, a fact Baker says to be financially significant.

"It means you can make a hell of a lot of money by open pit mining with those grades because the cost of open pit mining is quite low compared to underground mining," he says. "The grades we're intersecting there would support an underground operation, however."

Baker says Rainy River Resources has no intention of following in the path of such companies as FNX by mining the site themselves. Rather than graduate from a junior to a mid-tier, he says he is content to see the company remain as-is, allowing other companies to mine their discoveries while Rainy River Resources continues to leverage its technical strengths.

"We want to keep being an exploration company We're good at identifying areas that need exploring and at uncovering...