Victoria Gold seeks other Eagle Gold Mines

Victoria Gold Corp. July 18 said that while construction crews develop the Eagle Gold Mine, exploration continues across the wider Dublin Gulch property in the Yukon.

"While mine construction is Victoria's primary focus this year, the company does not intend to let the untapped mineral potential of the Dublin Gulch property remain untested," said Victoria Gold President and CEO John McConnell.

The open-pit, heap-leach operation being developed at Eagle Gold is expected to produce at least 190,000 ounces of gold annually over a 10-year mine life from 116 million metric tons of reserves averaging 0.67 grams per metric ton (2.66 million oz) gold. These reserves would be mined from Eagle Gold, the original deposit, and Olive, a satellite deposit about 3,000 meters to the northeast.

This year's exploration will focus on Olive-Shamrock-Spinach, a series of targets related to the Olive deposit; Bluto, a discovery northeast of Olive; Nugget, an earlier staged target to the east of Bluto; and VBW, an underexplored claim block immediately west of the Dublin Gulch Claims.

This season's exploration of these outlying targets is supported by satellite camps that have been built to allow exploration to proceed without impacting the development of the Eagle Gold Mine.

Victoria's exploration efforts at Eagle and Olive-Shamrock over the last several seasons have greatly advanced the exploration model for the Potato Hills Trend, a roughly 13-kilometer- (eight miles) long corridor that host Eagle, Olive and most of the other exploration targets on the Dublin Gulch and VBW claims.

It was the application of this mineralization model that drove the definition of the Olive-Shamrock zone.

Last year's 34,000-meter drill program and 5,600 meters of trenching expanded upon known deposits at Dublin Gulch and discovered new targets along the Potato Hills Trend.

"Through the drill-bit, the company was able to demonstrate that there is much more to the Eagle Gold Mine than captured in the 2016 feasibility report in terms of gold mineralization and potential for extra mine life," said McConnell. "Additionally, last season's work successfully advanced known areas of gold mineralization such as Olive-Shamrock as well as opened access for the first time to a series of new mineralization targets including Spinach, Bluto and Nugget. Any of these target areas have the potential to host another Eagle or Olive-Shamrock style deposit, and we look forward to demonstrating additional, definable gold deposits across the highly prospective Dublin Gulch property in the coming years."

In addition to drilling, the 2018 Dublin Gulch exploration program includes mapping, prospecting, surface trenches, soils geochemistry and geophysical surveys.

–SHANE LASLEY