Chuck Hawley never gives up on Golden Zone

No one knows Alaska's Golden Zone better than Chuck Hawley. Since 1967, when he first saw the property near Denali Park while working for the U.S. Geological Survey, Hawley has devoted years of his life and a couple of million dollars to exploration at Golden Zone. He has worked with a string of companies, but now, at age 76, Hawley believes Vancouver, British Columbia-based Piper Capital might be the one to prove up the gold reserves that he is convinced are there.

Hawley himself, a director emeritus of the Alaska Miners Association, keeps his maps and data in a modest basement office at Alaska Earth Sciences in Anchorage. But he prefers to be out in the field. He spent most of last summer supervising his colleagues at Golden Zone: four drillers supplied by Layne Christensen and the Piper crew of geologists, camp hands and a cook. There was a small mining operation at Golden Zone before World War II and the crew uses the original bunkhouse, built in 1936, as an office and cookhouse.

The ore at Golden Zone is in a breccia pipe, a cylindrical body several hundred feet across. Breccias are composed of angular broken rock fragments held together by a mineral cement or in a fine-grained matrix. Golden Zone is in the approximate south-center of the Tintina Gold Belt, which contains many significant deposits, including Dublin Gulch, Pogo, Fort Knox, Donlin Creek and Pebble. The breccia pipe contains a 43-101 compliant, preliminary measured and indicated resource (using a 1 gram per ton gold cut-off) of 2.8 million metric tons grading 2.81 g/t gold, containing approximately 253,000 ounces of gold, 1.2 million ounces of silver and 6.1 million pounds of copper.

Piper Capital took off in 2004

Hawley got together with Canadian promoter Barry Domvile in 1999 with a view to setting up a public company, but Piper Capital didn't take off until 2004, when the much larger British company Hidefield Gold decided to invest in Golden Zone, as geologist John Prochnau had heard of the property. Prochnau came on board with Piper, as did barrister Ken Judge as president and CEO. Hawley is chairman of the company and Domvile is vice president for corporate development. Geologist Pam Strand, Piper's COO, is also CEO of Shear Minerals, a company that is focused on exploring for diamonds in Canada and Alaska.

Piper completed the first two phases of drilling last summer and after looking at the data, Hidefield exercised its option to acquire up to 50 percent of the company's interest in Golden Zone. Piper is currently in the process of buying out most of Mines Trust's interest in the project. Mines Trust is another company that Hawley put together in the early 1990s. He had drilled and mapped the property in the 1970s as a consultant, and around 1980 he organized some investors to buy out the old-timers who owned it.

Texas-based Ensearch, a gas distributing company, leased Golden Zone and drilled over 10,000 feet in the Zone in the early 1980s, but gave up when the price of gold began falling in 1985. Hawley formed a company in 1987 called Golden Zone Developments that went public on the Vancouver exchange, and the following year optioned the property to another Canadian junior, United Pacific Gold, that did a large amount of work before going broke.

Mines Trust optioned Golden Zone to Colorado-based Addwest Minerals from 1994 to 1999, but once again the price of gold plummeted and work stopped. By 1996 there had been 66,000 feet of drilling on the property and there were several thousand feet of underground workings. "I've spent a couple of million easily, mostly money I should have taken in salary," Hawley told Mining News. "I figured it was good insurance, it would pay off some day, and who knows, it still might."

Hawley is confident of success despite the fact that decades of drilling haven't produced the spectacular results he has been hoping for. "I believe there's lots there," he said. "Some things have been over-drilled. It's a complicated ore body. It plunges almost vertically down. It's kind of a leaching pipe where hydrothermal solutions came up and created a void, and the rocks collapsed into the void." Piper has started drilling away from the known ore body to expand the reserves.

Road built in 1937-38

Golden Zone is quite easily accessible, as a road to the property was built by the territorial administration in 1937-38. Hawley has been reluctant to draw much attention to it up until now, however, because its proximity to Denali Park could draw protesters. "We have to be really careful about water quality and air quality," he said. Piper has enough air quality data, but it needs to start measuring water quality again and do a wetlands survey. The project could reach the pre-feasibility stage within two years, Hawley thinks.

As a history enthusiast whose biography of Alaska's "flying miner" Wesley Earl Dunkle was published in 2003, Hawley is keen to preserve the mill that operated at Golden Zone between 1941 and 1942, and possibly open it to visitors. The building qualifies as a historic landmark which could receive state funds for refurbishment. Hawley would like to set up a non-profit to lease the surface rights to the area around the mill. All the land at Golden Zone is state-owned.

Piper further expanded its activities in late summer of this year, staking 108 state mining claims totaling about 16,000 acres south of Mount Estelle in the south-central Alaska Range. This is a more remote property than Golden Zone, located 109 miles northwest of Anchorage. "There is a huge land play going on out there that nobody knows anything about," Hawley said. "Kennecott has hundreds of claims there." AngloGold Ashanti's Terra prospect is also just 19 miles away.

Piper's initial interest in the South Estelle project area was triggered by the presence of clusters of anomalous gold values in stream sediment samples. Reconnaissance sampling in August 2005 confirmed mineralization in two previously reported prospects, Ultramafic and the Revelation Vein, and identified two new prospects designated Train and Saddle. "We wanted to learn enough over the winter to plan what we're going to do next summer," Hawley said.