New kid on the Canada block: Onyx Gold

As a vehicle for Ontario and gold exploration properties spun out of HighGold Mining Inc., the cleverly named Onyx (ONtario Yukon eXploration) Gold Inc. hit the ground running with an experienced team and the capital to begin exploring as one of Canada's newest mining juniors.

HighGold felt its land holdings within the highly prospective and overlapping Tintina and Tombstone gold belts in Yukon's Selwyn Basin and within Ontario's portion of the Abitibi greenstone belt, Canada's most prolific gold region, would be better suited under a new explorer.

Maintaining a 20% share, the company established Onyx Gold, which holds 100% interest in four properties in eastern Yukon and three in the Timmins area in Ontario.

Totaling 1,075 claims in 21,000 hectares (51,892 acres), Onyx Gold's Yukon holdings comprise King Tut, RGS, Canol, and Stan properties, with the most compelling being King Tut. Its 34,400-hectare (85,004 acres) portfolio includes Muro-Croesus, Golden Mile, and Timmins South.

Past exploration work at King Tut has outlined multi-kilometer-long, gold-in-soil anomalies with no prior drilling. Wasting no time, Onyx began exploration efforts just a few weeks after launching as its own entity.

"We are very excited to see Onyx Gold launched and to hit the ground running in the Yukon, in the heart of what we believe is one of the most exciting new gold districts in North America," said Onyx Gold Executive Chairman Darwin Green. "We have laid the foundation for Onyx Gold to be a leading explorer in the junior gold space with an enviable portfolio of high-quality gold properties in two of Canada's top gold jurisdictions led by a seasoned management team with demonstrated successes in all areas of the sector."

Onyx kicked off its exploration of the Yukon with a 2,500-meter program at King Tut, which the newly minted Canada-focused junior believes to host the best undrilled intrusive-related anomalies within eastern Yukon's emerging Tombstone Gold Belt not already controlled by Snowline Gold Corp.

The first King Tut target to be drilled was Golden Mask, a 1,000- by 1,000-meter gold-in-soil anomaly. Associated with geochemical signatures like bismuth, tellurium, tungsten, and arsenic, all signs pointed to a reduced intrusion-related gold system.

Further signaling its potential, nearly every sample collected from the Golden Mask anomaly returned assays of greater than 20 parts per billion gold, with most samples running above 50 ppb gold to a peak of 1,423 ppb (1.42 grams per metric ton) gold.

Lying about nine kilometers (five miles) east of Golden Mask, Main Tut is a large gold-in-soil anomaly that is more than 6,000 meters long and 200 to 1,500 meters wide.

Defined by a broad zone of moderately to strongly anomalous gold-in-soil values of up to 13.39 g/t gold, Main Tut was also found to be coincident with strongly anomalous reduced intrusion-related gold system pathfinder geochemical signatures similar to Golden Mask.

In November, Onyx reported that its 2023 drilling confirmed presence of reduced intrusion-related gold mineralization at both targets. While the grades where low, the best hole cut 187 meters of 0.13 g/t gold, they are reminiscent of mineralization on the edges of a higher-grade core.

"We look forward to interpreting this data as the 'smoke' to the high-grade 'fire,' and we are anxious to get back on the ground at King Tut again next year," said Onyx Gold President and CEO Brock Colterjohn.

In addition to gold targets similar to those being drilled at the Valley discovery on Snowline's Rogue property about 50 kilometers (30 miles) to the north, Onyx says King Tut shows evidence for sedimentary exhalative (SEDEX) zinc-lead-silver mineralization similar to what is found on Fireweed Metals' Macmillan Pass project located 30 kilometers (20 miles) to the east.