A little bit more detail. Before I get on with my short presentation, I do have to bring your attention to this forward-looking statement advisory, as this presentation may contain forward-looking statements. Just running through a very quick overview of the drilling to date, we'll start with more of some of the peripheral drill holes. Most of it took place in the Conquest Zone, which we'll get into. A few of the holes took place more on the periphery. Some of those holes, 29, 30, and even 28, were testing near this portion of a large medium magnetic low. The main thing to take away from that, it wasn't the most satisfactory drill result, but what we did see was a very large and intense white alteration. This was the white altered rhyolite.
This is the same rhyolite that we see in the Conquest Zone, the same style of white alteration. Now it's actually a beige rhyolite. The prospector called it green rhyolite, and this illite actually alters it to these little green and tan. Very large intercepts, strongly illite and silicified rhyolite with pyrite. We know from surface sampling this is globally anomalous. Further work has to be undertaken. Here, clearly, there's a very large zone of illite-silica-pyrite alteration. Illite is one of the sort of middle zones of the alteration halo around an epithermal core. Testing this part indicated the, you know, dead-on by the looks of things, but certainly, the alteration suggests that more work has to be undertaken in this area. It was kind of a surprise. We drilled one hole into a copper target up here, hole number 30.
We didn't hit much copper mineralization, but what we did hit was very clear mineralized hydrothermal breccias, very similar to what we see in and around the discovery trench area. Two zones: one of the hydrothermal breccia itself, again, mineralized with pyrite, same specification that we see in the discovery zone. Another sort of zone a little bit deeper down of weakly hydrothermally altered vent breccias. This is very similar to what we see in the discovery zone. We know we have a structure that actually winds its way down from that intersection all the way down to just west of the main Conquest trend. This is quite a nice surprise. Further work obviously has to be undertaken in this area. You know, we thought this was more of a copper target based on the 2021 drilling, but now we're back into clearly what looks like the hydrothermal.
We have to drill the whole system. Just south of that, I drilled a very short hole near the surface showing, discovered by the prospector. There was some very specific rhyolite, quartz staining, so we need to drill that in and dissect what we saw on the surface, but we did hit what looks like flabrite, so-called pebblite. I'll have a look at a picture of that a little bit later. That's some of the peripheral stuff. Now we're really focusing in on the Conquest Zone. Here's actually going back to the copper target. Here is, you know, we were drilling what we thought was a copper target based on 2021 drilling. What we did hit was these specific breccias. Here's a picture of what we think is cobaltite. Some people may think it's sprayed pyrite, but it's a very different color than the pyrite we normally get.
We don't see a lot of sprayed pyrite at Moon's Development. I think, more importantly, it's not cubic. It's actually a tabular crystal, which is more akin to what some of the gold tellurides are. This is hosted in the surface. The green is caused by an epidote alteration, but most of this quartz in here, so it's an epidote-tinged quartz. With the weight of the acid, I believe this could be a little cobaltite crystal. Again, we know we have a lot of tellurium in that drilling for 2021. Some of the highest global tellurium values were right next to this. Not a lot of gold, but perhaps the gold-bearing fluids are passing through that now tellurium-rich system and hence the potential cobaltite. We're really going to focus in on the Conquest Zone. There are several important things that we intersected in the Conquest Zone.
Most importantly, it's what we call adularia banding. We'll have a look at that in the following slides. This is predicted to hit in hole 34 down here at about 130 m down hole, vertical depth of 110 m. We also hit some visible gold or electrum in that hole as well, some more tellurides. Tellurides also hit in hole 33 along with a very wide zone, about 40 m of hydrothermal brecciation. At the bottom of that hole too, we get a very large zone of manganese carbonate alteration, which we'll get into. Visible gold at the top of hole number 26. A little bit of anomalous illustration with a little bit of calcite, ornite flying around, but as well, we see the crust of ornite, polyphasal banded quartz fragments or void fillings. Visible gold, as I say, associated with these adularia banding.
I'll show up a closer look at another also gold telluride in hole number 33. This is what adularia banding looks like. It's very, again, it's a crust of ornite, polyphasal banded quartz veins. These are some of the best banded quartz veins we've seen so far at Northern Shield Resources Inc.'s development. This is the first time we've seen what we call adularia banding. Adularia banding is very flat bands. You can see little parts of that almost sinking into the quartz veins. In typical systems, these are very silver-rich. The dark angles are typically anomaly or acanthite. Then you get gold-bearing, gold bearing angles or native gold or electrum around that. We don't know what's in here yet. We have to walk away for analysis. Certainly, when you zoom in to that, and this zoom-in photograph is taken from right here on this rock sample.
If you see, it's about half a centim wide. You've got this band of blackish-purple metallic mineral, which I'm not sure what it is, but we believe it's a silver-bearing mineral, which would be very consistent with the typical adularia bands in these systems. Within that, you either have fibrate-rich bands or perhaps these are electrum or other minerals or fibrate with electrum. These are two adularia bands. We'll wait for the analysis, but these are some sort of metallic sulfide, gray sulfide in here along with pyrite or something else creating a more brassy colored layers. This is the first time we have seen adularia banding at Northern Shield Resources Inc.'s development. It's very important because that's what typically you want to be bringing in your precious metals in epithermal systems. They're very diagnostic of epithermal systems.
If there's any doubt that this is a low-sulfidation system, this totally confirms that it is. Quite a nice quartz vein in the second to last hole of the program. Here's one of the larger adularia bandings. You can see another quartz vein in here with the development of adularia on the outside. Very exciting and positive to see this adularia band on these quartz veins. I encourage you to take time and, you know, Google these and look them up because they're very, very prominent in low-sulfidation epithermal systems. When you get enough of these bands, you can begin getting a lot of high values of your precious metals. Again, within that same hole, you see, again, this banded quartz vein. This is what I call crustiform polyphasal banded quartz veins. They're indicative of the boiling zones and very characteristic of low-sulfidation epithermal systems.
You don't need a lot of sulfide in these quartz banded veins or some of these banded quartz veins to bring in your precious metals. We'll wait to see what the assay results say. We do have, within that same interval, there's a 3.3 m interval where we saw a hummus polyphasal crustiform banded quartz vein, like you're seeing here along with the adularia banding. In one of those, you see what looks like krennerite. Krennerite, again, is one of the gold telluride minerals. It's very prismatic. It's striated. There could be some other thing, but based on its shape and morphology, we believe it is krennerite. What this other stuff is, whether it's a very fine grain pyrite or more telluride, it's the assay results, the width of the assay results. This certainly looks like krennerite. We know we've got tellurium in the system.
From past data studies, we haven't really locked onto any gold tellurides visually in the core. This, again, is one of the first indications of gold tellurides in the drill core at Root & Cellar Property. Moving on, hole 33 was drilled essentially in a different direction and underneath hole 16 for 2023 where we hit that hydrothermal breccia, which some of you maybe recall. This hole is similar but has a lot more bladed pyrite and a lot more free quartz. We know the critical ingredients to the gold at Root & Cellar Property in a lot of facets is not only mineralization, but quartz.
We see a lot more quartz in this for almost 40 m, not quite continuous, a few short intervals of barren looking rock, but otherwise, it just had from about 40 m depth with a lot of mineralization, a lot of quartz staining, and a lot of bladed pyrite. You can sort of see it in here in some of these quartz veins cutting these extremely altered rhyolites. You can see a zoom in here of the bladed pyrite. Here's one of the colored quartz vein breccias. Quartz is highly brecciated, and a matrix of that has a lot of disseminated sulfides. In that intercept, we have what very much looks like a crystal of cobaltite. It's actually still under a thin film of the quartz staining. It's not quite reached the cut surface.
A lot of those other things are pyrite, but we clearly see both the euhedral shape of that crystal, lots of striations. I think it tells us that this is probably a cobaltite, which again is one of the other gold telluride minerals. Hole 26 was quite interesting because, first of all, I think we get a little bit of visible gold in the top of the hole where we see numerous void fillings of liquid crust of ornate, polyphasal banded quartz. Some of this was associated with the minor chalcopyrite, bornite, plus or minus alunite mineralization. One of them had a little fleck of visible gold. Deeper down on the real surface of that drill hole was to undercut hole 16 that we drilled in 2023, the oatmeal breccia hole.
We did hit hydrothermal breccias beneath that, I think about 2.5 m width, a little bit of mineralization represented by these red diamonds. These are all intercepts of mineralized hydrothermal breccias or veins. The smaller ones are more weakly mineralized, so we'll write some specification about pyrite. At the intercept below hole number 16 from 2023, and again, more importantly, we hit something that looks like the south wall or another structure in the Conquest Zone. This was at about a 200-m depth. Again, weak to moderate, but clearly hydrothermal features, a lot of specification, pyrite, chlorite alteration, which we tend to see associated with these near-surface epithermal mineralized structures. This appears to be a new structure which you can see on the geophysics, but we know it's actually capped off by barren basalts when it gets near the surface.
There's not a lot of surface expression of at least being mineralized. We appear to be intersecting that. It seems to mask this cross-section through the magnetic wall. Hole 27 was just drilled underneath hole 26. Again, it hit long intervals of minor, you know, so trace amounts of chalcopyrite and bornite, plus or minus alunite. We think that copper mineralization may be a hangover from the pre-existing copper porphyry, which we know is somewhere in the area, and the gold is overprinting that. At depth, it didn't hit anything significant representative of epithermal, but we think now there's a fault here that we thought at one point may be just a flexure in the structure and maybe this would actually be the better portion of the quartz vein system.
It actually looks like now it's being sliced off and it may actually continue at depth on the other side of this fault. As you can see, the orientations of both sides of this sort of V-shaped structure up here mimic what you see down below. The deep hole, hole 24, which intersected that elbow at depth, had a lot of very strong manganese carbonate alteration and some other manganese is important for the softening associated with some of these high-grade, low-sulfidation epithermal occurrences. Some quartz fragments, but they again appear to be truly banded with some manganese, a little pink tinge to them. We believe this was actually targeting a north cell structure and it was drilled into this image. It may have been actually between parallel to this structure that now we realize we really want.
We really want to turn this drill hole around and come through this as a system because certainly the carbonate alteration is very, again, I know one of the classic alteration halos to an epithermal system or the other halo of the prolific zone has a lot of carbonate alteration. We haven't seen too many places other than at Woodfall where we see this strength of carbonate alteration. We believe this is indicating close proximity to one of the main chunks of the epithermal system. The next steps are really to do downhole structural surveys. The casing is still in many of these drill holes. We drop a camera down that does 360-degree pictures of the drill hole. It measures the orientations of all the structures, including obviously the adularia quartz vein structure, which is located right here. As soon as we can, we'll conduct a downhole structural survey.
That will be very important to guide in our next drill program, which we hope to get underway as soon as we can after that structural survey, later on late summer or early fall. Just to kind of place some of this, that adularia banding was here. The hole was drilled 34 from the southwest towards the northeast towards hole number two from 2021. I'm trying to get moderate grade, but no indication of adularia banding or even crustiform ornate veins yet. 100 m down and slightly off to one side. We always thought we had north-south structures here. You know, in 2021, we're drilling more of the east-west, but we believe there's some north-south structures cutting through here. That's what we believe we hit in this hole 34 from this drill program.
I'm very keen to get back into this area, find out the orientation of that, and just keep following that adularia banding to depth. That's really it. If you have any further questions, I'd be happy to answer.
Nice man. I just got a couple of questions for you myself. First one, I know everybody and their brother is looking for assay results. I see it online. I see it when I talk to people. I know you mentioned them a couple of times today, but what's the timeline? What are we looking at for getting those?
Yeah, we don't really know what's going to be. Typically, turnaround time is four to eight weeks, which you get a batch in. There are several batches that have gone in throughout the program. It's obviously summertime too, a lot of samples going in, a lot of people on holiday. I imagine, you know, hopefully by the end of August, we'll start getting at least some of your very large batches in place. It's really anybody's guess and somewhat of it under control, but I imagine between mid to probably the end of August, we'll start to see the first batches come in. We are analyzing it by a slightly different analytical package this time, so I don't know if it's an extension on it or not, probably not.
We wanted, based on the importance of chloride in the system here, the patch detection was 10 ppm, which is quite high. We wanted to drop that down to one, so it's really starting to work as a pathfinder. We've sort of swapped the analytical package at this time for getting much lower detection on some of the trace elements. Hopefully, at the end of August, when everybody's returning from holiday, we start getting some batches of assay results back.
Great. I appreciate that. Otherwise, I'll just ask you, what are you most excited about for the rest of the summer?
I think, I mean, this adularia banding is just, you know, we haven't seen it before. Again, it's kind of being tapped into the right parts of the system. It's telling us it's low-sulfidation. It's telling us we're in a boiling zone. Typically, you know, we get some pretty high precious metal values in these systems, especially when you start building up those adularia bands. All that was really exciting to see. It's very meaningful to people that understand these systems. It was, you know, just exciting to see these truly low-sulfidation textures and how close they were to previous drill holes. This is what's important to remember. You can be so close but just miss these things. Now we're beginning to come back and find evidence of, you know, the boiling zone in haunting new portions of the Conquest Zone to be filled there. They are around.
We know we have one off-flow zone sort of the western end of that trench. We believe this is marking another one. We know we have similar structures 100 m deep to that. We now haven't seen this adularia banding. I think it's more in that area. I'm very keen to get back to drilling as soon as we can and keep following this adularia vein system alongside into that.
Awesome. Ian, thanks so much for sharing this with us today, especially given you've just gone through some dental surgery. I really appreciate your time. If anybody has any additional questions, please just send them in. I'll make sure the Northern Shield team gets them as soon as possible and can get back to you. Otherwise, have a great day.