The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
A successful start to the 2020 drill program at Unga project North of 60 Mining News – November 25, 2020
Aquila, at the southwest end of the Shumagin trend on Unga Island, is one of five gold targets Heliostar is drilling this year.
Heliostar Metals Ltd. Nov. 23 announced it tapped gold-silver mineralization in the first hole the company has ever drilled at the Aquila target on its Unga project on the Alaska Peninsula.
Situated at the southwest end of the Shumagin trend, one of two corridors of gold and silver mineralization running across the breadth of Unga Island, Aquila was discovered by Battle Mountain Gold in the 1980s.
Trenching along the main outcropping vein zone at Aquila is reported to have encountered up to 11.48 grams per metric ton gold and 53.5 g/t silver over 3.7 meters in the discovery trench.
Limited drilling at that time, however, was unsuccessful and abandoned in large part due to poor drill recoveries.
With modern drilling techniques, Heliostar is obtaining better core recoveries with its 2020 program.
AQ20-01, the first hole of this year's program at Unga, cut 3.6 meters averaging 4.46 grams per metric ton gold and 6.8 g/t silver from a depth of 37.6 meters at Aquila.
"Having success in our first hole at the Aquila target is a great start to the Unga drilling program," said Heliostar Metals CEO Charles Funk.
Heliostar has drilled four additional holes to further test the 800-meter-long trend of gold mineralization associated with a network of epithermal veins it has identified with mapping and sampling at Aquila.
"Drilling has intersected the vein in four of five holes, and it remains open along strike and at depth," said Funk.
In addition to the five holes drilled at Aquila, Heliostar has completed nine holes at SH-1, three at Apollo, and four at Sitka.
SH-1, the most advanced target at Unga, hosts 866,015 metric tons of inferred resource averaging 13.8 g/t (384,318 oz) gold and 35.4 g/t (986,321 g/t) silver. Apollo and Sitka are the sites of historic mines that produced roughly 150,000 oz of gold from high-grade epithermal veins from 1886 until 1922.
Drills are currently testing Empire Ridge, a target about 3,000 meters southwest of the historic Apollo mine.
"Heliostar's aim in 2020 is to demonstrate the potential for Unga to host a significantly larger resource and the company intends to continue an aggressive exploration and resource drilling program in 2021," said Funk.
The company says under-utilization of the drill rigs due to lack of contract staff has impacted the planned 2020 program at Unga and the company now expects to complete roughly 3,500 meters of drilling during the current program. As of Nov. 23, 3,063 meters of this drilling had been completed.
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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