The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Completes first field work on Alaska gold property in 20 years North of 60 Mining News – December 9, 2022
Existing roads could lower the need for helicopter-supported drilling in certain areas of the Flat gold project in Alaska.
Tectonic Metals Inc. Dec. 5 announced that it completed a field program in preparation for 2023 drilling at Flat, an intrusion-hosted, bulk tonnage gold project in the Kuskokwim Mineral Belt of Southwest Alaska.
Located about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of the world-class Donlin Gold project, Flat is a 92,160-acre property Tectonic leased from Doyon Ltd. that covers the likely lode source of two creeks – Flat and Otter – that are estimated to have produced more than 830,000 oz of placer gold since 1908. When you add in other streams draining Chicken Mountain on the property, this total is more than 1.3 million oz of alluvial gold.
Historical exploration carried out from the 1960s until 2003, including roughly 11,000 meters of drilling, has outlined a 3,800-meter-long and up to 600-meter-wide gold-in-soil anomaly formed by intrusion-hosted mineralization that begins at surface and remains open along strike and at depth.
Tectonic's 2022 surface field program at Flat, the first exploration program on the property in more than 20 years, included ground-truthing, channel and grab sampling of historic bedrock exposures, and sampling of new trenches at the Chicken Mountain anomaly that makes up the main zone at Flat.
Much of the work focused on western portions of the Chicken Mountain anomaly, a previously undrilled and untrenched area where sampling has returned up to 8.8 grams per metric ton gold in soils and 3.4 g/t gold in grab samples.
Tectonic crews dug three trenches for a total of 273 meters, collected 180 continuous channel samples and 18 grab samples. Seven additional bedrock exposures in historical trenches and placer mining cuts in the Chicken Mountain area were sampled and mapped with 71 meters of channel samples and seven grabs collected.
"Our year one objective at Flat was to build a strong technical foundation that will provide the basis for a comprehensive exploration program, including drilling, at Flat in 2023," said Tectonic Metals President and CEO Tony Reda.
In addition to the field work, the 2022 Flat program included metallurgical testing on historical drill core; extensive geological, geochemical, and geostatistical modeling; relogging of the historical drill core; petrography; historical geophysical interpretation; and a logistical and onsite infrastructure audit.
"Success next year does not only mean discovering gold but also evaluating those ounces found as accurately as possible with respect to metallurgy and mining methods," Reda added. "We want to put our best foot forward going into next year's drilling program and anticipate that our technical focus in 2022 will bolster the value of any ounces found while continuing to guide our exploration strategies at Flat."
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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