The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Drilling taps intriguing mineralization next to Alaska border North of 60 Mining News – December 11, 2020
Golden Sky Minerals Corp. (formerly Luckystrike Resources Ltd.) Dec. 10 reported promising results from its 2020 drilling at Hotspot, a 46.4-square-kilometer (17.9 square miles) gold exploration on the Yukon side of the Alaska-Yukon border.
Hotspot is situated along the Big Creek fault, a regional-scale fault system that hosts numerous porphyry and orogenic gold deposits in Alaska and the Yukon. The closest such deposit is Taurus, a porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum deposit on Kenorland Minerals' Tanacross property about 25 kilometers (16 miles) to the northwest on the Alaska side of the border.
After carrying out sampling and prospecting at Hotspot during the summer, Golden Sky completed 568.5 meters of reverse circulation drilling in six holes targeting the Sure Bet zone during a program that got underway in September. The company reports that all the holes hit near-surface gold mineralization.
Golden Sky says the gold mineralization at Hotspot is hosted in rhyolite with silver-antimony-mercury-arsenic pathfinder metals, indicative of rhyolite-hosted low-sulfidation epithermal systems similar to Kinross Gold Corp.'s more than 20-million-ounce Round Mountain gold project in Nevada.
"This is a grassroots discovery in an unexplored part of the Yukon," said Golden Sky Minerals President and CEO John Newell. "We may have a deposit type not yet seen in the Yukon on our hands."
Highlights from Golden Sky's 2020 drilling at Hotspot includes:
• 71.6 meters averaging 1.34 grams per metric ton gold from a depth of 4.6 meters in hole HSRC-20-02.
• 19.8 meters averaging 0.62 g/t gold from a depth of 67.1 meters in hole HSRC-20-03.
• 83.8 meters averaging 0.4 g/t gold from a depth of 3.1 meters in hole HSRC-20-06.
The longer intercept in HSRC-20-06 included a 1.5-meter high-grade section averaging 20.9 g/t gold.
Due to the limitations of the RC drill equipment, these holes were drilled to a maximum drill depth of 100 meters. Of the six holes, Golden Sky reports that three were terminated in low- to mid-grade gold mineralization.
The company said the six first-pass holes drilled this year tested a 200-meter stretch of the 1,700-meter mineralized structure identified at Sure Bet. This includes an area about 1,200 meters north of the drilled area where soil sampling has returned grades as high as 0.55 g/t gold.
An extensive follow-up diamond drill program is being considered to test the gold mineralization identified at Hotspot at depth and along strike.
"The results of the RC drill program make it clear that more information is needed," said Newell. "Discussions are already in the works for bringing a diamond drill to the property for the 2021 season to thoroughly test the Sure Bet zone and gain more insight to the structural and alteration settings associated with this mineralized system."
Golden Sky said this year's soil and rock sampling program also identified a potential mineralized zone with a pathfinder signature similar to Sure Bet about 1,000 meters to the west.
In addition to Hotspot, Golden Sky's portfolio includes the Luckystrike, Bull's Eye, and BRC properties in Yukon's White Gold District.
Sampling of one trench dug across the Gold Crest zone on the Bull's Eye property this year returned 78 meters averaging 0.69 g/t gold.
The programs at Bull's Eye and Hotspot were partially funded by the Yukon Mineral Exploration Program (YMEP), which provides risk capital for grassroots mineral exploration in the territory.
"Their support has been instrumental in advancing Hotspot and similar programs through the initial exploration phase," said Newell.
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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