Junior resumes exploration in Nyac

After staking 25,600 additional acres in the Nyac Gold District earlier this year, Tonogold Resources Inc. has embarked on Alaska exploration it hopes will yield a big payoff.

The California-based junior mining company began drilling June 7 at Bonanza Ridge, one of six gold prospects it aims to explore with a drill this summer.

"We are very excited to begin drilling operations at Nyac. Our exploration activities of 2005 delineated extensive drilling targets with great mineralization and our 2006 exploration program calls for drilling those targets with a view towards making a discovery," Tonogold President Jeff Janda said June 7.

The work is part of a field program planned for 2006 in which Tonogold aims to drill 32 holes totaling 12,000 to 20,000 feet within six enticing targets.

Tonogold will "come close to or might actually exceed" spending $2.27 million to complete the work, according to Brian Zamudio, the company's chief financial officer.

Initially, the company is drilling eight core holes through gold-rich soils and into gold-mineralized granitics at Bonanza Ridge and the adjacent gold-mineralized volcanic "wall rocks" at nearby Shamrock Ridge in the Kuskokwim River Delta near Bethel, according to company officials. Maximum drill depth for these initial holes will be 900 feet each.

Boart Longyear is the drilling contractor, and the drill being used is a Longyear LF-70 core drill. Core size is HQ (2.25 inch diameter), and the estimated drill rate is 100-plus feet per shift, or 200-plus feet per day.

The company targeted Bonanza Ridge because of excellent results from samples taken last year from Bonanza Peak. Surface samples assayed up to 3 grams per ton gold with rock chip samples to 15.1 grams per ton, the company reported.

"We have good geologic and geochemical reasons to expect a discovery hole from this first round of drilling," said Don Strachan, Tonogold's vice president of exploration. Tonogold completed the first drill hole June 12.

"Except for U.S.G.S. geologist Robert E. Wallace in 1945, nobody has ever found ore of any thickness in the Kilbuck Mountains," Strachan told North of 60 Mining News June 12. "Placer Dome drilled in the Nyac district in the 1960s. They drilled in the valleys, but Tonogold is exploring both the ridges and the valleys. We have a different idea."

Gold in the Nyac claims occurs in a multitude of faults, veins, and veinlets in granites and volcanics typical of Alaska's emerging Tintina Gold Belt. The structural webwork at Nyac was filled with gold-rich hydrothermal fluids during the cooling of the 100-million-year-old granitic intrusives.

Wallace discovered free gold on an outcropping between the Tuluksak River and Lower California Creek, Strachan added. In all, the Nyac district has yielded more than 700,000 ounces of gold in placer deposits.

Tonogold sampled about six square miles in the southwestern half of its original Nyac property in the 2005 grid geochemical program, resulting in 1.5 square miles of contiguous soil gold values consistently higher than 0.1 parts per million gold. Individual soil samples returned values as high as 4.2 ppm gold and individual rock chip samples up to 15.1 ppm gold.

Tonogold delineated 1.5 square miles of gold values in its 2005 surface geochemical program that are consistently higher than 0.1 grams per ton. Individual soil samples were up to 4.2 grams per ton gold and individual rock chip samples to 15.1 grams per ton gold. These substantial surface results in the southwestern half of the Nyac gold district prompted the company to increase its holdings to 83,200 acres, or 130 square miles, from the 57,600 acres, or 90 square miles, originally leased from Alaska Native regional corporation, Calista Corp.

"I thought there was potential in the areas around the claims we already staked with Calista, so we staked additional claims with the State of Alaska," Strachan said.

In a report on Tonogold's 2005 exploration program released in November, Strachan said "geologic potential for the Nyac gold district is a multiple of Fort Knox in scale and may be equivalent or slightly higher in grade."

"Nyac metallurgy appears similar to Fort Knox," he added.

Tonogold also plans to conduct additional mapping, soil sampling, and geophysical surveys by Sept. 1. Some 16-24 workers, including support staff from the Calista organization, set up camp near the drill site May 1, and began helicopter-supported geologic mapping and soil grid sampling May 20.