Glacial retreat bares Newmont Lake target

Crystal Lake Mining Corp. June 12 said a large copper-gold porphyry target area with high-grade gold potential, known as Chachi Corridor, has been outlined on the eastern side of its Newmont Lake project in the heart of British Columbia's Golden Triangle.

Located about 30 kilometers (19 miles) northwest of Skeena Resources Eskay Creek project and about the same distance southeast of Teck Resources and Newmont Goldcorp' Galore Creek project, Newmont Lake is in an area known for deposits rich in gold, silver and copper.

NW Zone, which is related to the northeast trending McLymont fault on the Newmont Lake property, hosts 1.4 million metric tons of historical inferred resource containing 6.79 million pounds of copper, 200,000 oz gold and 291,000 oz silver.

Chachi is a northeast trending corridor along the McLymont fault system about 6,000 meters northwest of NW Zone.

Crystal Lake said this corridor, which extends for about 8,000 meters along strike and is 3,000 meters wide, is defined by an extensive review of historical geochemical and geophysical data. The entire corridor, which features astonishing glacial retreat, is underexplored and will be one of Crystal Lake's primary areas of focus for the 2019 summer exploration program, now underway.

Limited rock sampling of a 1,000-meter unglaciated area on the eastern side of Chachi Corridor in the late 1980s returned samples with as much as 14.2 g/t gold, with eight of the 28 samples collected containing more than eight g/t gold.

Crystal Lake said a more the 3,000-meter-long gossanous zone, an intensely oxidized and weathered rocks indicative of underlying mineralization, is adjacent to a cluster of intrusion types known to host porphyry systems and mineral occurrences in this region.

The company said a team of roughly 20 people at any given time will be exploring and validating Chachi Corridor.

The initial phase of this program will include extensive prospecting, lithological and alteration mapping, geophysics and geochemical and alteration vectoring using the latest in-field mobile hyperspectral and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) technology. Crystal Lake said this phase-1 work should quickly define priority targets for drill testing this summer.

"The right people, the right area, the right time – we've assembled an amazing team that's planning an expansive initial exploration program that will be systematic and discovery-driven, applying state-of-the-art exploration technologies," said Crystal Lake Mining President and CEO Richard Savage.

–SHANE LASLEY