VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – Junior explorer Prize Mining has intersected the highest gold-in-soil sample in recorded history along the Silver King shear system at its Kena-Daylight gold project, in south-eastern British Columbia.

The Calgary, Alberta-based company on Tuesday reported the initial batch of soil assay results from Phase 1 fieldwork on the Daylight property, which confirmed the presence of at least two large prospective geochemical trends, the company said in a news release.

The Daylight-Starlight trend had nine samples that returned greater than 100 parts per billion (ppb) gold, including a best sample return of 8 009 ppb gold. This equates to about 233 600 oz of gold per ton.

The pattern of soil anomalies along the 1.3-km-long Daylight-Starlight trend is narrower and somewhat spotty in comparison with the Great Western Trend, but an alignment of significant anomalous gold/silver/bismuth in soils does coincide with known induced polarisation chargeability trends and with the known historical workings, the company said.

The Great Western geochemical anomaly is about 1 km long by 300 m wide and includes 48 samples over the ninetieth percentile of 100 ppb gold. A cluster of strongly anomalous samples in the northern part of the geochemical anomaly returned up to 745 ppb gold. A 300 m trench will be dug along that trend during the second phase of the exploration programme, Prize advised.

"We are excited to report the best soil samples to date on the Daylight property, which highlight the potential for the discovery focused drill programme. We will use a combination of the new encouraging soil results, historical soil samples and past drilling and geophysical analysis to refine the upcoming Phase 2 trenching and Phase 3 drilling programmes schedule to start in August and September," president and CEO Feisal Somji said in a press release.

Following the news release, the junior’s TSX-V-listed stock fell as much as 17% on Tuesday to a 52-week low of C$0.25 a share.