The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
North of 60 Mining News – June 30, 2023
Felix Gold's 2022 drill program unveiled a more than 1 million ounce gold target at NW Array on the Treasure Creek project.
High-grade outcropping skarn mineralization at Wiseman East.
Felix Gold has accumulated a large land package in the Fairbanks Mining District, including the Treasure Creek property about 12 miles west of Kinross' Fort Knox gold mine.
Wiseman Metals is exploring three large mineral properties under an agreement with Doyon Ltd., the Alaska Native corporation for Interior Alaska.
The Venus-Evelyn Lee-Horace trend extends for 7.5 miles across the Wiseman East property.
Geophysical data has identified a large concealed magnetic anomaly that could represent a source of the high-grade copper and gold found on surface at the Evelyn Lee target.
Since emerging on the Alaska mineral exploration scene in 2021, Felix Gold Ltd. has amassed more than 150 square miles of gold-enriched properties in the Fairbanks Mining District and is working toward establishing an inaugural resource at one of the most prospective gold targets discovered so far on this enormous land package.
As Felix carries out systematic drilling to outline an at-surface resource within the million-ounce-plus NW Array gold target on its Treasure Creek property about 12 miles west of Kinross Gold Corp.'s Fort Knox Mine, the Australia-based team behind the Alaska gold explorer is investigating the incredible and underexplored metals potential America's Last Frontier has to offer.
The brainchild of a group of renowned geologists and mine builders with more than 200 years of combined experience, Mine Discovery Fund was formed to identify Tier 1 mineral assets in favorable jurisdictions around the globe and spin these prospective projects into junior exploration companies purpose-built based on the jurisdiction and commodity being pursued.
Since the formation of Felix Gold, MDF has incubated three more companies to explore for zinc, copper, and other metals in Europe and the Americas.
While the scope of MDF is global, the junior exploration company incubator keeps coming back to Alaska due to the largely untapped potential for precious, base, and critical metals found across the northern state.
"We love Alaska, we think it is an extraordinary minerals belt and we think it is totally underexplored," Mine Discovery Fund Managing Director Joe Webb told Mining News. "We think it has potential for all the critical minerals in the world – it hasn't been known as a big copper jurisdiction yet, we think it will be."
Seeing copper as the "main game in this world," MDF formed Wiseman Metals to explore for copper, rare earths, and associated metals on three land packages owned by Doyon Ltd., the Alaska Native corporation for Interior Alaska.
More information on Doyon and its mineral properties can be read at Partnerships unlock golden Doyon potential in the Alaska Native Claims magazine.
"At Wiseman East there is a potential to unlock a new copper porphyry district and the REE project is a carbonatite with evidence of niobium and heavy rare earths," Webb told Mining News.
Mine Discovery Fund's foray into Alaska began with Felix Gold, which is a tip of the hat to Felix Pedro, the Italian prospector who made the 1902 placer gold discovery that put Fairbanks on the map.
Today, Felix Gold is delineating a maiden resource for the NW Array target on the Treasure Creek gold-antimony project near the Pedro discovery about 20 miles north of Fairbanks, a mining city that is the Alaska equivalent of Kalgoorlie in the Goldfields–Esperance region of Western Australia.
There are two main differences between these two mining districts – the gold-rich area around Alaska's Golden Heart City is far less explored than its Western Australia counterpart, and Kinross is actively seeking ore from nearby sources to feed through its mill at Fort Knox.
"It was a bit of a shock for us. If this was Kalgoorlie, next to a Tier 1 mine, the whole district would be plastered with drill holes," Webb told Mining News.
Recognizing the underexplored gold potential around Fairbanks and the hungry Kinross Alaska mill, Felix Gold picked up a large land package that was assembled by Millrock Resources Inc., a longtime Alaska mineral project generator. Building off this already substantial land position, Felix amassed additional properties covering some of the most prospective lode sources for the nearly 10 million ounces of placer gold recovered so far from the streams in the Fairbanks District.
Less than three years later, the explorer is delineating a near-surface gold deposit that could offer a source of ore for the Kinross Alaska mill or support a standalone mine at a highway-accessible project less than a 30-minute drive north of Fairbanks.
"Felix's objective is the discovery of a multi-million-ounce gold resource in the infrastructure rich Fairbanks district and I am extremely pleased with the progress our team is making towards fulfilling this goal," Felix Gold Managing Director and CEO Anthony Reilly said at the mid-June launch of an infill drill program at NW Array.
Felix Gold began its exploration of the Fairbanks District with a compilation of historical data followed by comprehensive mapping, sampling, and prospecting across its newly assembled properties during the summer of 2021. This work revealed NW Array at Treasure Creek as a promising target to begin building a multi-million-ounce gold resource
With NW Array elevated to drill-ready status, MDA took Felix Gold public on the Australian Securities Exchange with an A$10 million (roughly US$7 million) initial public offering at the beginning of 2022.
Before the snow was completely melted, Felix Gold had reverse circulation rigs drilling shallow holes to begin to understand the surface gold mineralization at Northwest Array.
Highlights from the 2022 drilling at NW 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.
• 35 meters averaging 1.81 g/t gold from a depth of 16.8 meters in hole 22TCRC075.
• 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.
Based on its initial drilling, an exploration target of 1.1 million to 3.6 million oz of gold in 76 million to 92 million metric tons of material averaging 0.4 to 1.1 g/t gold was calculated for the top 200 meters of NW Array.
"Having calculated a sizable JORC-compliant initial exploration target for the NW Array we are now in the position of being able to make inroads into a maiden mineral resource estimate," said Reilly.
Toward the objective of building a near-surface resource that could offer feedstock for the Kinross Alaska mill at Fort Knox or support a standalone operation at Treasure Creek, Felix is in the midst of a roughly 3,500-meter in-fill drill program that is slated to include 30 to 40 RC holes drilled to an average depth of around 100 meters.
This drilling will focus on the NW Array Southern Zone, a subset of the larger exploration target that hosts about one-quarter of the potential resource.
To fund this exploration, Felix closed an A$2.8 million (roughly US$1.8 million) financing in April.
Felix expects to complete the NW Array Southern Zone infill drilling by the end of July and have a maiden resource calculation of this first target on the company's extensive landholdings in Alaska's Fairbanks Mining District by the end of the year.
While building a million-ounce-plus gold deposit is Felix's primary objective at Treasure Creek, this property also happens to be rich in antimony, a metalloid that falls between metals such as zinc and solid nonmetals like sulfur with some interesting properties that make it critical to military hardware and emerging renewable energy storage technologies.
This semimetal is credited with saving countless American troops during World War II due to antimony-based fireproofing compounds applied to tents and vehicle covers.
Over the eight decades since the end of World War II, antimony continues to save innumerable lives – from soldiers in the field to babies in the nursery – by lending its flame-resistant properties to clothing, mattresses, toys, electronic devices, aircraft, and automobile seat covers.
Antimony is also used in night vision goggles, laser sighting equipment, munitions, and a wide range of other military applications.
Despite its strategic value to the U.S. military and critical applications in the private sector, no marketable antimony is being mined in the U.S. Instead, America depends on oft adversarial countries for more than 80% of its needs, with the rest coming from recycling.
According to USGS data, China and Russia produced roughly 73% of the global supply of antimony in 2022.
Geopolitical tensions with China and Russia's war with Ukraine has the Pentagon looking for and investing in projects that could offer secure domestic supplies of antimony.
Treasure Creek, which provided the U.S. with antimony during World War I and still hosts high-grade deposits of this strategic metalloid, could offer one such source.
"In 1915 antimony ore was mined on four properties in the Fairbanks district at the Scrafford, in Treasure Creek basin; the Stibnite, in Eva Creek basin; the Gilmer, in Vault Creek basin; and at Chatham Creek mine," U.S. Geological Survey geologist Alfred Brooks penned in a 1917 report, "Antimony deposits of Alaska."
Scrafford on the Treasure Creek property, the most prolific of these Fairbanks-area antimony mines, produced an estimated 2,700 tons of ore containing greater than 50% stibnite over the years.
Former U.S. Bureau of Mines geologist James Barker, who did much of the early-stage exploration of Treasure Creek prior to Felix's acquisition, told Mining News that antimony historically mined from Scrafford "was sacked and transported by cable tram up to the ridge top and then by horse-drawn wagons into Fairbanks to be shipped south by river steamer" to support the war effort.
This historic mine is located just southeast of NW Array, where Felix has identified strong antimony mineralization found alongside the gold and is beginning to investigate this critical metalloid.
"We think the antimony-gold association is going be pretty critical," Webb told Mining News.
As Felix builds a near-surface gold resource and investigates the antimony potential in the Fairbanks District, Wiseman Metals is carrying out discovery-level exploration to accumulate modern geological information that will demonstrate the highly prospective nature of its copper and critical mineral projects in Alaska before going public.
And the results of the sampling, geophysics, and other preliminary exploration carried out so far indicate that Wiseman Metals is ready for an IPO as soon as the market is ready and understands its story.
The privately held exploration company's portfolio is anchored by Wiseman East, a 530-square-mile project just east of the Dalton Highway about 250 miles north of Fairbanks that hosts multiple high-grade copper-gold-silver skarn occurrences and shows evidence of multiple porphyry intrusions associated with these skarns.
On the opposite side of the Dalton Highway lies Wiseman West, a 116-square-mile land package with intriguing zinc, lead, and gold potential.
The Wiseman Metals portfolio is rounded out by Kazeene, a road-accessible critical minerals project enriched with rare earths and niobium in the Tofty Tin Belt about 100 miles northwest of Fairbanks.
All three of these properties are being explored under an agreement with Doyon, which owns both Wiseman properties and the core of Kazeene.
"Doyon Limited entered into a lease agreement with Wiseman Metals to undertake exploration for metals critical for transition to renewable energy, like copper and niobium, on the Wiseman East, Wiseman West, and Kaazene projects," the Interior Alaska Native corporation wrote in a mid-June update on the projects.
These properties have all the key elements Metals Mine Discovery Fund Chairman John Main, who is familiar with Alaska from his more than 45-year geology career, is looking for in the state – great geology, proximity to the highway system, and a partnership with Alaska Native communities.
Doyon says it is encouraged by Wiseman Metals' dedication to the Alaska Native corporation's heritage and the exploration carried out this year will add value to the properties and unlock new opportunities for its shareholders.
Wiseman Metals is particularly excited about the district-scale opportunities at Wiseman East, a copper-enriched property that has seen little work since it was explored by Kennecott Exploration in the 1970s.
Immediately upon the mid-2022 closing of an exploration lease agreement with Doyon, Wiseman Metals geologists began investigating this underexplored property with sampling, mapping, geophysics, and reverse circulation drilling.
This work has discovered the potential for at least three large copper porphyry centers associated with the high-grade skarns on the property.
The largest of these prospective porphyry intrusions is the 7.5-mile-long Venus-Evelyn Lee-Horace trend.
Venus, which lies at the southeast end of this trend, hosts very-high-grade skarn outcrops. Two of the highest-grade rock samples collected from skarns at Venus last year contained:
• 6.4% copper, 6.92 g/t gold, and 9 g/t silver.
• 4.9% copper, 2.77 g/t gold, and 135.2 g/t silver.
One RC hole drilled at Venus last year cut 12.2 meters averaging 0.7% copper, 7.6 g/t silver, and 0.37 g/t gold.
Even more impressive copper grades were sampled from skarns at Evelyn Lee, which lies northeast of Venus about midway along the porphyry trend. Highlights from the 2022 Evelyn Lee sampling include:
• 6.1% copper, 6.64 g/t gold, and 60.7 g/t silver.
• 24.2% copper, 2.19 g/t gold, and 37 g/t silver.
• 30% copper and 35g/t silver.
Wiseman Metals said the skarn mineralization sampled at Venus lies next to a large magnetic anomaly that could represent a large and yet-to-be-drilled source of the high-grade copper-gold-silver mineralization sampled on surface.
Horace is a large magnetic complex at the northeast end of the 7.5-mile-long trend where reconnaissance rock chip sampling has returned up to 0.5% copper, 0.47 g/t gold, and 126 g/t silver.
The 2022 program at Wiseman East also investigated Ginger-Hurricane, a five-mile-long trend about 3.5 miles north of Evelyn Lee.
Mapping and sampling of this trend identified coherent zones of strong copper anomalism in soil XRF samples of up to 0.74% copper at Ginger at the southwest end of the trend and up to 1.2% copper at Hurricane at the northeast end.
Rock chip samples from Ginger-Hurricane returned grades as high as:
• 8% copper, 1.38 g/t gold, and 91.9 g/t silver.
• 17% copper, 0.2 g/t gold, and 18.9 g/t silver.
The copper anomalies identified along this trend are closely associated with magnetic anomalies identified with geophysics flown last year.
The third trend identified so far at Wiseman East, Victor-Eva, is earlier staged and smaller but shows the classic geophysical and geochemical signs of a copper porphyry body:
• Large magnetic complex associated with outcropping intrusions.
• Copper mineralization identified in limited reconnaissance sampling.
• Known induced polarization (IP) anomalies associated with magnetic anomalies.
• Large areas of alteration at surface.
Given what Wiseman Metals has identified through the compilation of historical data and the results from its 2022 program, the private exploration company believes it may be onto an underexplored porphyry copper district.
The company is currently carrying out IP geophysical surveys, along with additional mapping and sampling, at Wiseman East in preparation for a planned 3,000-meter drill program that will test the most promising targets later this summer.
Wiseman Metals geologists are also exploring the mineral potential at Kaazene, a roughly 100-square-mile land package covering an area of Interior Alaska known for abundant placer tin mineralization with associated niobium, rare earths, and other critical minerals.
The alluvial tin in the streams of this area, known as the Tofty Tin Belt, was so abundant that it was burdensome for placer gold miners. There was so much of the tin mineral cassiterite in the stream gravels that it would fill the riffles of their sluice boxes, leaving no room for the gold they were going after.
Sampling of the tailings from the historical placer mining in this district has turned up as much as 7% niobium oxide.
Carbonatites – carbonate-rich igneous rocks that often carry rare earths and other critical minerals – have been identified at Kaazene. Geophysical surveys flown over the area have identified a magnetic anomaly coincident with the carbonatites that extends for 19 miles.
The Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys (DGGS) investigated the carbonatite in 1984 and again in the 1990s.
The 1984 program included shallow drilling that cut magnetite-rich, niobium-bearing carbonatite with rare earths and yttrium.
In a 1998 report, DGGS said the carbonatite body running across the Tofty Belt "is much more extensive than previously thought; it thus is likely that the niobium resources of the area were underestimated by several orders of magnitude."
Wiseman Metals struck a deal with Doyon for a 23,000-acre land package covering a section of the carbonatite trend and staked state mining claims covering another 39,000 acres along trend and over a strong magnetic anomaly to the south.
"We think there is a parallel series of carbonatites that run through here as well," Webb said of the southern group of claims making up the larger Kaazene property.
This year, Wiseman Metals is looking to gain a better understanding of the critical mineral potential at Kaazene with a field program that includes mapping and soil sampling followed up by trenching or drilling to further investigate the most promising niobium and rare earths targets turned up by the surface work.
Webb told Mining News that this work began with initial sampling in mid-June.
As Felix Gold builds an initial resource at Treasure Creek and Wiseman Metals explores the copper and critical minerals potential on Doyon lands, the MDF team continues to scan Alaska for new opportunities in a Tier 1 mining jurisdiction that remains vastly underexplored.
"We love Alaska and are trying to get the right balance sheets to support what we believe is a jurisdiction where metals critical to the security of supply chains will come from," the Mine Discovery Fund Managing Director told Mining News.
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.
Reader Comments(0)