Viking uncovers tungsten-rich stockpile at Nevada mine

Viking Mines has uncovered a potentially valuable source of near-surface tungsten at its Linka project in Nevada, with sampling confirming a historic stockpile left behind by previous operators still carries grades comparable to those mined during the project’s heyday.

The company collected 41 samples across the Linka stockpile, returning an average grade of 0.4 per cent tungsten trioxide with peak values of up to 1.1 per cent tungsten trioxide.

Importantly, when a 0.1 per cent tungsten trioxide cut-off is applied, the average grade then lifted to 0.5 per cent tungsten trioxide – matching the historical average mined grade reported from the Linka operation.

For a surface stockpile of previously mined material, that’s a meaningful validation. The pile is neither diluted waste nor a statistical outlier but something that looks very much like run-of-mine ore sitting above ground.

Linka is a classic skarn deposit in which the calcium tungsten mineral scheelite formed at the contact between Ordovician limestone and granitic intrusive rocks. The mine produced tungsten ore from the 1940’s through to the mid-1950’s, when the US Government buying programme ended.

What Viking is working with now is the legacy of that earlier mining: stockpiled material that was left behind when the economics of the day no longer justified processing it.

The results provide fresh support for Viking’s strategy of advancing two parallel opportunities at the project. The first is to extract near-term value from historical surface material while testing the broader resource potential through maiden drilling.

And in a market where tungsten prices continue to hover near record highs, Viking’s strategy of processing stockpile material to produce a bulk concentrate sample for offtake assessment effectively turns a historical artefact into a near-term commercial pathway.

The company has already moved to the next stage, dispatching samples from both the Linka stockpile and the nearby Conquest open pit to ore-sorting specialist TOMRA in Germany. The test work will assess whether the tungsten-bearing material can be upgraded prior to processing, potentially improving project economics and reducing downstream processing costs.

As the world’s leading ore sorting technology provider, TOMRA’s test work carries credibility. Using high-speed, sensor-based technology to sort the ore, the process analyses and separates valuable minerals from waste rock at the level of individual particles. By rejecting barren rock before grinding, it can upgrade the mill feed while saving massive amounts of w