The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
As drills focus on expanding zinc-silver deposits, Australian company is securing claims over newly identified prospects North of 60 Mining News – July 30, 2021
This first hole of the 2021 program at Red Mountain tested a down-dip expansion target at the Dry Creek VMS deposit.
In addition to roughly 10,000 meters of drilling, the 2021 program at Red Mountain includes on-ground reconnaissance exploration to help refine drill targets at newly identified VMS prospect areas on the expanded property.
White Rock Minerals Ltd. is carrying out the largest exploration program at Red Mountain, an already district-scale project in Alaska that keeps getting bigger as the Australian explorer continues to find more zinc, silver, and gold mineralization on the outskirts of this now 323-square-mile (836 square kilometers) land package.
By late May, White Rock had already begun a more than 10,000-meter drill program that is testing both intrusive-related gold targets at the Last Chance prospect and expanding upon the high-grade silver-zinc-gold-lead volcanogenic massive sulfide resources already identified at Red Mountain.
"White Rock has a plethora of exploration opportunities across its contiguous Last Chance-Red Mountain project in central Alaska," said Quinton Hennigh, a technical advisor to White Rock Minerals. "The dual opportunity to explore an exciting new large orogenic-intrusion-related gold system and a potentially world-class volcanogenic massive sulfide district at a time when all metals are heading into a resounding bull market puts White Rock in a league all by itself."
The 2021 drilling got started at Dry Creek, a silver-rich VMS zinc deposit at the eastern end of the Red Mountain Property.
Dry Creek and the nearby WTF deposits host 9.1 million metric tons of Australian Joint Ore Reserves Committee- (JORC) compliant inferred resource averaging 5.8% (1.17 billion pounds) zinc; 2.6% (516 million lb) lead; 0.1% (26.5 million lb) copper; 157 g/t (46.1 million oz) silver; and 0.9 g/t (260,000 oz) gold.
This year's drilling at Dry Creek will include roughly 3,800 meters of drilling in seven holes focused on testing the down-dip expansion potential of the resource with 200-meter spaced holes along the entire 1,200-meter length of the deposit.
While drills were focused on expanding the current resource area, White Rock staked up ground covering a trend prospective for similar VMS mineralization along the south side of the property.
"Surface reconnaissance has identified multiple prospect areas, some with high-grade massive sulfide rock float that is dominantly sphalerite (zinc sulfide), galena (lead sulfide), chalcopyrite (copper sulfide) and pyrite (iron sulfide)," White Rock Minerals CEO Matt Gill explained in a July 19 email.
With reconnaissance exploration identifying six targets along this Keevy VMS trend, crews are carrying out more detailed geologic mapping, systematic surface sampling, and geophysics surveys to prioritize drill targets.
White Rock says they are already being prepared at two of these targets – Easy Ivan and Jack Frost.
The 2021 drilling at Red Mountain will also follow up on the Last Chance gold discovery, where the 2020 reconnaissance drill program encountered grades as high as 24.8 g/t gold over 1.2 meters.
This year's expansive program is being carried out from two camps, the original camp near Dry Creek and another larger camp to support the exploration at the western end of the property.
In addition to the crews carrying out mapping, sampling, geophysics, and drilling, the White Rock CEO commended the hard work of the "often unsung heroes – the kitchen and camp support, chopper pilots, pad builders, and the other great support staff we have."
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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