The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Sees evidence of Eskay Creek-like gold system at discovery North of 60 Mining News – May 20, 2022
Visible gold in a sample collected from the Casper discovery on the Nickel Mountain property that averaged 76.9 g/t gold.
Click photo to see larger map.
Garibaldi Resources Corp. May 13 reported that early-stage exploratory drilling at the Casper target on its Nickel Mountain property in British Columbia's Golden Triangle cut gold mineralization along 260 meters strike length of the quartz-gold vein system.
Located about 11 miles (18 kilometers) southwest of the historic Eskay Creek Mine, Nickel Mountain is best known for the E&L zone, a high-grade magmatic nickel-copper-cobalt massive sulfide discovery surrounded by a multitude of base and precious-metal outcrops of nickel, copper, zinc, gold, silver, and platinum group metals.
While E&L and the numerous other base metal targets that have been identified are the primary focus of Garibaldi's exploration at Nickel Mountain, Casper provides a more easily accessible target to explore when weather makes it difficult to access the nickel-rich targets that are located on higher mountainous terrain.
Late last year, Garibaldi drilled five holes at Caspar to follow up the success at this gold discovery in 2020, including one hole that cut 3.58 meters averaging 4.05 grams per metric ton gold and 0.6 g/t silver.
CAS-21-05, the best hole of the 2021 drilling, cut 4.5 meters averaging 10.15 g/t gold from a depth of 129.5 meters, including a 1.5-meter subsection averaging 29.94 g/t gold.
Garibaldi reports that eight of the nine holes drilled at Casper over the past two years have intersected significant gold mineralization, with increasing gold grades towards the southeast.
The company says the drilling validates the concept that gold mineralization is associated with a broad silicified volcanic unit rather than discrete local veins, expanding the potential for a much larger gold-bearing mineral system. Also, the complex structural relationships evident from the lidar data highlight the potential that the results sit on the edge of a much larger gold-bearing mineral system where altered country rocks and quartz veins with elevated gold are controlled by northwest-to-southeast and north-to-south lineaments (linear geological features such as faults) corresponding to a shear zone.
This offers an opportunity to expand the footprint of the mineral zone and identify structurally controlled blow-outs with economically interesting grade and thickness of gold-silver mineralization.
"We are very encouraged by the second round of drilling results at Casper. We are still in the very early stages of this project, but we have confirmed that gold is present in both veins and the silicified host rocks. This verifies that the Casper system could be another gold rich system in the Eskay Camp," said Garibaldi Resources Vice President of Exploration Jeremy Hanson.
Previously reported surface trenching has also exposed the Casper vein for over 120 meters strike length, and rock samples of greater than 1 g/t gold have been collected from the surface for more than 330 meters.
The company says fine-grained visible gold has also been encountered with drilling and trenching carried out this year.
"The Casper discovery continues to bolster our impressive Eskay area precious metal prospects," said Garibaldi Resources CEO Steve Regoci. "The high-grade Ni-Cu-PGE E&L system at Nickel Mountain is the primary focus along with numerous base metal targets identified from the results of the property wide ZTEM geophysical survey. These new base and precious metal targets will provide additional opportunities for significant discoveries in the Golden Triangle."
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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