The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Mining Explorers 2022 - January 19, 2023
A drill crew tests the Northwest Array target during Felix Gold's 2022 drill program on the Treasure Creek gold project in Alaska's Fairbanks Mining District.
With the January completion of an A$10 million (U$7.1 million) initial public offering and listing on the Australian Securities Exchange, Felix Gold Ltd. went into 2022 well-positioned to begin drilling the large package of gold exploration properties it had assembled in Alaska's Fairbanks Mining District.
As a private company, Felix entered into a strategic alliance with Millrock Resources Inc. in 2021 on several Interior Alaska gold exploration projects – Treasure Creek and Ester Dome near the city of Fairbanks, plus the Liberty Bell project about 70 miles to the southwest.
In exchange for becoming a roughly 6% shareholder of Felix after its early 2022 listing on the Australia Stock Exchange, Millrock assigned the company all rights to the Fairbanks District and Liberty Bell properties.
Since its deal with Millrock, Felix has expanded its land position to roughly 151 square miles (392 square kilometers) in the Fairbanks District, which has produced more than 8 million ounces of placer gold since Felix Pedro discovered gold there in 1902.
"The Felix team undertook the largest consolidation of tenure in the history of the Fairbanks Gold Mining District," said Felix Gold Managing Director and CEO Joe Webb.
With its treasury full, Felix launched its 2022 exploration with a more than 17,000-meter drill program at Treasure Creek, a property about 13 miles west of Kinross Gold Corp.'s Fort Knox Mine that hosts numerous prospects with interesting drill intersections reported by prior workers.
Roughly 2,000 soil samples collected by Felix and Millrock geologists during 2021 identified two key targets for this drilling – Northwest Array and Eastgate.
Felix' inaugural drill program started with shallow reverse circulation holes at Northwest Array.
The Australian explorer hit gold right away. Highlights from drilling at Northwest Array include:
• 29 meters averaging 1.4 grams per metric ton gold from a depth of 24.4 meters in hole 22TCRC002.
• 33.5 meters averaging 1.63 g/t gold from a depth of 1.5 meters in hole 22TCRC005.
• 29 meters averaging 0.69 g/t gold from a depth of 1.5 meters in hole 22TCRC006.
• 89.9 meters averaging 1.2 g/t gold from a depth of 32 meters in hole 22TCRC008.
"Felix's ambition was to build multi-million-ounce gold resources and recent results are a significant step towards realizing our vision," said Felix Gold Chairman Ronnie Beevor.
In October, the Australian explorer reported that assays from additional holes from Northwest Array had further expanded this emerging gold zone. Highlights from the batch of drilling included:
• 41.1 meters averaging 1.72 g/t gold from a depth of 59.4 meters in hole 22TCRC078.
• 24.4 meters averaging 1.08 g/t gold from a depth of 51.8 meters in hole 22TCRC083.
With this batch of results, drilling had outlined 400 meters by 750 meters of gold mineralization at Northwest array that remains open to the north, south, and east.
"NW Array is quickly building into a significant gold discovery," said Webb. "Critically, NW Array and the broader Treasure Creek Project is surrounded by infrastructure within the world-class Fairbanks Gold Mining District, which has produced over 16Moz in historical gold output. Nearby operations include Kinross Gold's Fort Knox Gold Mine, a large-scale gold processing operation that is openly seeking additional sources of ore supply."
Treasure Creek and the other properties that make up Felix Gold's enormous Fairbanks District land package could potentially provide the Kinross Alaska mill at Fort Knox with a nearby source of ore.
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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