The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Mining Explorers 2020 - Published January 19, 2021
As Resolution Minerals and Millrock Resources drill the Aurora gold target at 64North in November (light at bottom of photo), Northern Star Resources has a drill turning on the Goodpaster gold discovery (green glow) between Aurora and the Pogo gold mine lighting up the sky in the background.
With Northern Star's' Pogo gold mine in the background, Resolution Minerals test the Reflection target at 64North.
Resolution Minerals Ltd. is on a mission to reveal the rich gold potential in Alaska's Goodpaster Mining District, home to Northern Star Resources Ltd.'s Pogo gold mine.
While still known as Northern Cobalt Ltd., this Australia-based junior cut a deal with Millrock Resources Inc. to earn up to a 60% interest in 64North, a 160,000-acre land package encircling the Pogo Mine property, by investing US$20 million in exploration spending over four years.
This enormous property is divided into nine claim blocks – West Pogo, Shaw, Eagle, LMS-X, South Pogo, East Pogo, North Pogo, Last Chance and Divide.
Upon earning a 60% interest on the entire 64North project, Resolution will have the option to increase its interest on one of the 64North blocks by funding a feasibility study for the selected block and funding Millrock's portion of mine development, in the form of a loan.
Before the ink had dried on the deal, the partners were preparing for a winter drill program at West Pogo.
While most Interior Alaska projects shut down drilling during the cold months of winter, West Pogo has the advantage of being transected by the state-owned industrial road to the Pogo Mine.
By the end of 2019, the partners had pushed a four-mile road into the primary target area at West Pogo and drilled a well to provide water for a US$5 million 2020 exploration program.
As the name implies, West Pogo lies on the western border of the Pogo Mine property. Northern Star has traced Goodpaster, a recently discovered high-grade gold deposit, to the border of West Pogo.
Highlights from drilling in the Goodpaster zone include: 2.1 meters of 44.5 grams per metric ton gold; 0.6 meters of 100.1 g/t gold; and 0.3 meters of 170.2 g/t gold.
The stacked zones of high-grade gold mineralization in the Goodpaster zone appear to continue into the Aurora target, a 2,000- by 5,000-meter zone of low-magnetic rocks adjacent to a late diorite intrusion on West Pogo.
Resolution and Millrock began testing Aurora in March but before the second hole could be completed the program was suspended to allow crewmembers to fly home ahead of COVID-19 travel mandates.
Both holes encountered anomalous gold along with bismuth, arsenic and tellurium indicative of Pogo-style mineralization but not the high-grade gold the 64North partners were seeking.
Drills resumed turning in June, and by September the partners had completed seven holes in three targets at West Pogo – Aurora, Echo, and Reflection.
The most recent hole, 20AU07, was drilled to a depth of 712 meters to test a northeast trending structural zone proximal to an outcropping diorite intrusive and coincident with conductive rocks identified by geophysics in the Central zone at Aurora.
At a drill depth of 488 meters, this hole cut a seven-meter quartz vein within a 22-meter-thick zone of intense sulfides, alteration, and quartz veining. The assays from this altered zone returned weakly anomalous gold values.
"The geology team is encouraged by the presence of the seven-meter-thick quartz vein at hole No. 7 and it is important to drill more holes into this immediate area to test for grade variation, lateral extents of the vein, and possible stacked vein sets nearby," said Resolution Minerals Managing Director Duncan Chessell.
This follow-up drilling at Aurora resumed in November with two additional holes. Assays from this roughly 1,100-meter drill program were pending at the time of this report.
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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