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The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Drills tap gold on edges of deposit; Freegold eyes new zone North of 60 Mining News – June 2, 2023
Freegold's 2023 Golden Summit drill program began in March with holes testing an expansion area north of Dolphin Zone.
The Saddle zone target to be tested with drilling later this year covers a larger footprint with more known gold-bearing veins than the Dolphin-Cleary resource area at Golden Summit.
The eleven holes drilled this year or are underway at Golden Summit are primarily targeting the northern expansion of the 12-million-oz Dolphin-Cleary deposit.
Freegold Ventures Ltd. June 1 announced that the first holes of its 2023 drill program at Golden Summit have cut gold mineralization about 400 meters north of the 12-million-ounce Dolphin-Cleary gold deposit on this road-accessible project about 25 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska.
According to a calculation completed earlier this year, the Dolphin-Cleary deposit hosts 407.54 million metric tons of open pit mineable indicated resource averaging 0.92 grams per metric ton (12 million oz) gold, plus 282.3 million metric tons of open pit mineable inferred resource averaging 0.85 g/t (7.7 million oz) gold.
Freegold's 2023 resource upgrade and expansion drill program, which got underway in March, began by testing the northern extension of the Dolphin zone, where mineralization is open and trending toward the surface.
Initial results from the 2023 drilling show the potential to grow this already world-class gold deposit.
Highlights from the first three holes drilled this year include 56.7 meters averaging 1.02 g/t gold in hole GS2301 and 60.1 meters averaging 1.29 g/t gold in GS2302.
These holes were drilled along the northern margins of the Dolphin zone. GS2301 is particularly notable because it is a 400-meter step-out from the northernmost hole drilled.
So far this year, the company has completed nine holes on the north side of the Dolphin zone, and two others are underway in this resource expansion area.
In addition to the first holes of the 2023 program, Freegold reported results from GS2241, one of the last holes drilled in 2022. Drilled as an initial test of the potential western extension of the Dolphin Cleary resource, hole GS2241 cut 147.3 meters averaging 1.03 g/t gold.
Freegold said drilling later this year will follow up on the encouraging results received in GS2241 and test a more than 1,500-meter-long gold-in-soil geochemical anomaly that extends west from the deposit in the area where this hole was drilled.
In addition to drilling in and around the Dolphin-Cleary deposit, the company plans to carry out initial drilling at the Saddle zone about 4,000 meters east of the resource.
Saddle hosts the historical American Eagle Mine, which produced roughly 60,000 ounces of gold from ore that averaged 1.6 oz per ton gold.
Later this summer, one rig will test the potential for broad zones of mineralization surrounding the high-grade veins.
This is similar to the strategy that Freegold employed from 2020-2022 to expand the indicated resource at Dolphin-Cleary by more than 10 million ounces. Another intriguing parallel is this strategy involved expanding the Dolphin deposit east to the historical Cleary Hill Mine, which produced approximately 281,000 oz of gold from ore averaging 1.3 oz/t gold before the operation was shuttered during World War II.
Based on historical mapping, the 2,500-by-1,000-meter area at the Saddle zone hosts numerous gold occurrences with significant veining. Freegold says this large gold zone has not been systematically drill tested, making it an excellent target for discovery and adding to the already large gold resource at Golden Summit.
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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