The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Doubling open pit indicated resource, 14x inferred OP growth North of 60 Mining News – March 11, 2022
Nighthawk's 2021 drilling substantially expanded the higher-grade open pit gold resources at Indin Lake.
Nighthawk Gold Corp. March 8 reported a massive expansion to the amount of gold in the surface mineable indicated and inferred resources at Indin Lake, demonstrating the potential for a future large-scale, higher-grade, open pit project at this district-scale property in Canada's Northwest Territories.
According to the new calculation, Indin Lake hosts 46.4 million metric tons of open pit mineable indicated resource averaging 1.38 grams per metric ton (2.06 million oz) gold. This marks a 121% increase over the 933,400 oz of gold in open pit indicated resource in the 2021 resource calculation for Indin Lake.
In addition, Indin Lake now hosts 7.8 million metric tons of open pit mineable inferred resource averaging 1.68 g/t (601,400 oz) gold, a 1,400% increase over the 40,100 of open pit inferred resource in the 2021 estimate.
"The shift in our strategy early last year towards higher-grade, pit-constrained mineralization, combined with a much more accelerated and aggressive approach towards exploration, have resulted in a significant expansion in the OP (open pit) mineral resource estimates at our property," said Nighthawk Gold President and CEO Keyvan Salehi. "After evaluating all the data and working towards a future conceptual mine plan, we believe that the scalability of the project to a potentially robust, large open-pit operation, far outweighs the marginal decrease in overall OP grades compared to the 2021 estimate."
During the 2021 season, Nighthawk completed 72,325 meters of drilling focused on resources expansion and exploration drilling across the Indin Lake property.
Roughly 87% of the Indin Lake resource is found at the Colomac project, which includes four deposits within a roughly 80-square-kilometer (30 square miles) area at the center of Indin Lake.
Gold was encountered while testing extensions to all four of these deposits – Colomac Main, Goldcrest, Grizzly Bear, and 24/27.
The exploration portion of the 2021 program targeted areas with the potential for higher-grade, near-surface mineralization.
"We are particularly excited about the contributions of higher-grade, near-surface mineralization from the Kim & Cass, Damoti, and Treasure Island deposits," said Salehi. "These four deposits combined represent approximately 0.5 million ounces grading 2.62 g/t gold of inferred estimated mineral resources in the 2022 MRE (mineral resource estimate). These higher-grade deposits remain open along strike and at depth providing an opportunity to further enhance the global mineral resource estimated grades with additional drilling."
Nighthawk is evaluating the new resource estimate and finalizing the 2022 exploration program for Indin Lake. This program is expected to focus on expanding higher-grade near-surface gold deposits on the property, particularly Kim, Cass, Damoti, and Treasure Island.
"Our 2022 exploration program will focus on expanding higher-grade mineralization, whilst continuously looking at the entire property for additional higher-grade targets and long-term opportunities," said Salehi.
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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