The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Explorer to expand White Gold deposits, test district targets North of 60 Mining News – May 18, 2018
Developed by Dawson City-based GroundTruth Exploration, the GT Probe can take samples of the soil-bedrock interface at a fraction of the cost and with less environmental disturbance than the traditional method of trenching to take samples at the bedrock surface.
White Gold Corp. is eager to expand known gold deposits and make news discoveries across the roughly 1 million acres (390,000 hectares) of prospective lands it holds in the Yukon's White Gold District.
About half of this year's C$9 million exploration program is focused on regional targets across the extensive land holding, including more than 100 rotary air blast (RAB) drill holes, airborne geophysical surveys, over 22,000 soil samples and other exploration activates.
The balance of the 2018 program will focus on expanding the roughly 1.2-million-ounce gold resource at the company's flagship White Gold property.
"Our objectives for the 2018 exploration program are to expand known resources and continue our systematic regional program through the drilling of highly anticipated new discovery-stage drill targets," said Shawn Ryan, chief technical advisor, White Gold Corp.
White Gold Corp.
The company's portfolio is a reconvening of dozens of White Gold prospects legendary Yukon gold prospector Shawn Ryan has identified over the past decade.
Ryan, whose savvy prospecting helped spark a gold exploration rush across the Yukon that led to the discovery of Goldcorp's Coffee Gold project, serves as White Gold Corp.'s chief technical advisor.
"I'm helping them on the technical side; we got Rob Carpenter, who was leading the charge with Kaminak, on our board of directors," Ryan explained.
As president and CEO of Kaminak, Carpenter recognized the potential of Ryan's prospecting at Coffee and took the discovery to a roughly 3-million-ounce gold project that led to Goldcorp buying Kaminak for some C$520 million.
Jody Gibson, which has a decade of exploration experience including extensive work in the White Gold District and Alaska, is White Gold vice president of exploration.
In addition to this strong technical team, White Gold Corp. has financial and technical backing from two gold majors – Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd. and Kinross Gold Corp.
Agnico Eagle, which was interested in White Gold Corp. and the potential of the Yukon gold district bearing the same name, invested C$15 million to own a 19.9 percent stake in the new Yukon-focused gold explorer.
Agnico does not want its investment spent on drilling one gold deposit. Instead, the gold miner wants to leverage White Gold's grassroots exploration expertise and large land holdings in the district.
"They actually put it in the contract 'no delineation drilling with this money,'" Ryan said.
While Ryan had reassembled an enormous land position that reflects more than a decade of his savvy prospecting in the Yukon, one piece was missing – White Gold, the original discovery that sparked a gold exploration rush to a district that would come to bear its name.
By mid-2017, White Gold cut a deal to buy the namesake property from Kinross, which had bought the property through the acquisition of Underworld Resources in 2010.
In exchange for the White Gold property, Kinross owns a 19.9 percent interest in White Gold Corp.
"We look forward to working with Agnico Eagle and White Gold Corp. to support the pursuit of quality development opportunities in this highly prospective and largely underdeveloped district," Kinross President and CEO J. Paul Rollinson said at the time. "This investment will allow the three companies to pool their expertise together to strengthen their position in this excellent mining jurisdiction."
This pursuit began with a roughly C$9 million program in 2017 that expanded the deposits on the White Gold property and narrowed drill targets across the wider district.
"We are very pleased with the result of our 2017 regional exploration program, which has generated several new and highly prospective targets on our extensive land package and further validated and defined previously identified high-priority targets," said Gibson.
White Gold District
This year's regional exploration program will focus on high priority drill targets turned up in 2017 and before.
Ryan has a database of more than 300,000 soil samples taken from prospects across the White Gold District. To narrow the best drill targets uncovered by this extensive sampling, White Gold Corp. is utilizing GroundTruth Exploration, an innovative exploration company run by Ryan's wife Cathy Wood.
GroundTruth employs "Drones to Drills", a systematic mineral exploration technology that uses drones to collect ultra-high-resolution imagery of prospective areas turned up with sampling; soil-bedrock interface sampling with GT Probe, a track-mounted sampling rig designed by GroundTruth; and rotary air blast drilling using GT RAB, a remotely controlled tracked drill also developed by the company.
With a number of targets ready for the first phase of drilling, White Gold Corp. is planning roughly 100 RAB or reverse circulation holes this year to test targets on five properties.
The priority projects for this drilling include:
• Betty (six targets), a property immediately east of Goldcorp's Coffee property where RC drilling in 2012 cut 13.7 meters averaging 7.1 g/t gold and 209 g/t silver, 3.1 meters of 29.8 g/t gold, and 21.3 meters of 1.5 g/t gold;
• Black Hills (three targets), a road accessible property about 30 kilometers (19 miles) northeast of the White Gold property with significant placer gold in the nearby Black Hills Creek and numerous untested gold-in-soil anomalies associated with region-scale structures
• JP Ross (six targets), another road accessible property immediately west of Black Hills with significant placer gold in the area and numerous untested gold-in-soil anomalies associated with regional-scale structures and one RAB hole drilled last year cut 3.05 meters averaging 21.87g/t gold;
• Pedlar, a property just northeast of Coffee that hosts an untested porphyry target consisting of a 4,000- by 1,500-meter trend of strongly anomalous copper-molybdenum in soils and rock samples; and
• Wolf (one target), an untested 1,200- by 350-meter gold-in-soil anomaly about 35 kilometers (22 miles) west of White Gold where 2017 GT Probe work encountered consistent gold mineralization in 20 consecutive samples spaced five meters apart.
Additional exploration activity to prepare and better understand the company's other targets will include 2,000 line-km of airborne magnetic and electromagnetic geophysical surveys, Lidar surveys, drone surveys, induced polarization (IP) geophysical surveys, GT Probe sampling, mapping, prospecting, and sampling.
In all, the regional exploration is expected to be carried out on 16 of White Gold Corp.'s Yukon properties.
White Gold property
The balance of White Gold Corp.'s 2018 program will focus on its namesake property, including 8,500 meters of diamond and 6,000 meters of RC drilling.
The diamond drilling will focus on expansion of the Golden Saddle deposit and drilling to support advanced metallurgical testing on both the Golden Saddle and Arc.
A resource calculated earlier this year outlines 12.32 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 2.43 grams per metric ton (961,000 oz) gold; plus 5.16 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 1.7 g/t (282,500 oz) gold in the Golden Saddle and Arc deposits.
A consistent high-grade core of the primary Golden Saddle deposit area, GS Main, contains 832,000 gold oz gold in the indicated category averaging 2.96 g/t gold and 107,000 oz gold in the inferred category averaging 3.18 g/t gold.
Advanced metallurgical testing on the Golden Saddle and Arc deposits will be completed to guide further economic studies as well as assess the potential for near surface and oxidized mineralization.
White Gold Corp. said mineralization at both the Golden Saddle and Arc are known to extend beyond the limits of the current resource estimate and are believed to remain open in multiple directions.
RC drilling on the White Gold property is planned to focus on infill and expansion of the Arc deposit and testing of other defined high priority targets on the property including the McKinnon, Donahue, and Ryan's Showing.
Additional work planned on the White Gold property this year include IP-Resistivity surveys, GT Probe, soil sampling and geologic mapping will also be conducted to evaluate and define additional drill targets on the company's namesake property.
Crews are currently opening the camp on Thistle Creek, which is next to the White Gold property, and drilling is slated to begin by the end of May.
"I am eagerly anticipating the coming year which has the potential to be a very exciting season," said Ryan.
Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.
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