Stratabound wraps up 2022 summer season

Stratabound Minerals Corp. August 11 announced the end of its 2022 summer field program at the company's Golden Culvert and recently added Win gold projects in southeast Yukon.

After optioning Golden Culvert in 2017, Stratabound has spent several years establishing its foothold in the Yukon by advancing this underexplored property that neighbors Seabridge Gold Inc.'s high-grade 3 Aces gold project.

Found within the Hyland Gold Belt, a geologic extension of the Tombstone Gold Belt, Golden Culvert exhibits characteristics similar to other gold projects in the Yukon, such as Victoria Gold Corp.'s Dublin Gulch project, home of the Eagle Mine; the advanced Brewery Creek Mine project; Aben Resources Ltd.'s Justin project; and Banyan Gold Corp.'s Hyland project.

Needless to say, this is a highly prospective zone, and Stratabound plans for pay dirt.

Obtaining 40% ownership in Dec. 2021, the company recently completed an option agreement to acquire 100% interest in Golden Culvert.

Comprising 431 mineral claims, finalization of the option will require fulfillment of work requirements of C$350,000 at each of the Golden Culvert and Little Hyland (collectively, Golden Culvert) properties by Sept. 27.

Work on Golden Culvert fulfilled that commitment in 2018, and upon completion of the December 2022 payments, Stratabound will be deemed to have earned 100% of all the 84-square-kilometer (32 square miles) property.

During 2021, the company expanded the claim group by completing an additional transaction to acquire 100% of the mineral rights to the Win property, roughly 11 kilometers (7 miles) southeast of Golden Culvert, adding 15.7-square-kilometers (6 miles) to the initial 84 – summing up to almost 100-square-kilometers (39 square miles) of highly prospective land.

Exercise of the Win option will require C$35,000 of expenditures before the first anniversary of the option agreement. Upon completion of all payments and expenditures in its fifth year, Stratabound will have earned a 100% interest in the property.

2021 Golden Culvert results

Located in the Little Hyland Valley District of southeast Yukon, approximately 205 kilometers (127 miles) north of the town of Watson Lake, Golden Culvert is found near the Yukon-Northwest Territories border just a few kilometers from the now-shuttered Cantung tungsten mine – as a critical benefit, the property has access to the all-season Cantung Mine Road that runs through the project's claims.

Gold occurrences have been found in the upper Hyland River valley, forming a 50-kilometer- (31 miles) long belt that is considered to be the easternmost portion of the Tombstone Gold Belt, while the entire 800-kilometer- (497 miles) long Tombstone Belt lies within the greater Tintina Gold Belt that includes Fort Knox, Pogo, Brewery Creek, and Dublin Gulch, some of the largest gold deposits discovered in Alaska and Canada.

In 2020, Stratabound conducted a program that was run in two phases. Teams initially collected 116 soil and 157 rock samples and conducted ground geophysics and geological surveys on property-wide targets.

Of the surface samples analyzed, 92 averaged 13.46 grams per metric ton gold uncapped (8.85 g/t gold capped), while gold in 64 float-train samples averaged between 0.25 g/t and 320 g/t (9.3 ounces per ton) gold over a 1,000-by-100-meter area.

Encouraged by the first-phase results, the explorer undertook a second-phase program of diamond drilling in the late fall and completed 3,217 meters in 17 drill holes.

In January 2021, the junior reported the first assay results from the 2020 drill program at Golden Culvert. While drill hole GC20-01 cut 10.31 g/t gold over 1.6 meters and contained four specks of visible gold, the best intercept from the final results was GC20-16 which yielded 34.8 g/t gold over 1.8 meters.

"The abundance of high-grade surface samples collected in float-trains reported on November 17, 2020 that included 93 samples up to 320 g/t gold, averaging 13.27 g/t gold over 670 kilometers of strike across an 100-meter width, overlie and are sourced proximal to this latest drilling area," said Stratabound Minerals President and CEO Kim Tyler. "We remain encouraged to pin down that source."

2022 completed

A six-person field crew was deployed to investigate multiple new gold-in-soil anomalies derived from the soil sampling of the 2021 field season, with three of the anomalies yielding results continuously above 20 to 1,050 parts per billion gold average over 1,000 meters in strike length and between 50 and 350 meters in width.

The latest anomalies demonstrate a strong periodicity occurring at approximately 2,000-meter intervals along some 14 kilometers (9 miles) of strike north of, and including, the Golden Culvert main discovery zone.

Numerous additional smaller and discontinuous anomalies between 20 ppb and 190 ppb gold were also identified along a strike corridor of previously identified gold-mineralized trends.

"We are investigating the 2021 gold-in-soil anomalies in detail on the ground and hope to discover mineralized bedrock sources and float trains that similarly characterize the main discovery area that has yielded diamond drill results up to 2.53 g/t gold over 33.1 meters including 60.1 g/t gold over 0.9 meters, trench values up to 95 g/t gold over 1.5 meters, and surface float-train samples yielding up to 320 g/t gold within a 3-kilometer by 250-meter wide gold-in-soil anomaly," Tyler said during the most recent announcement.

In parallel, the Yukon Government supplied a maximum C$50,000 grant allowed under the Yukon Mineral Exploration Program to help toward funding the Golden Culvert 2022 program.

"We are also very appreciative to receive the support and confidence of the Yukon Government and Geological Survey for providing us once again with funding assistance," finished Tyler.