The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Mining Explorers 2023 - January 18, 2024
White Gold co-founder and chief technical advisor Shawn Ryan trekking into the company's namesake district in the Yukon.
Click image to see larger map of the Nolan property.
White Gold Corp. kicked off 2023 with an updated mineral resource estimate for its namesake project in the Yukon and with an exploration program aimed to continue outlining exactly what its massive land holdings in Yukon's White Gold District contain.
Located roughly 95 kilometers (59 miles) south of Dawson City, White Gold's namesake property is part of a roughly 350,000-hectare (864,869 acres) land package that covers approximately 40% of the White Gold District, which also encompasses Western Copper and Gold Corp.'s world-class Casino copper-gold project and Newmont Corp.'s Coffee Gold project.
Exploring and advancing this district for the better part of a decade, White Gold has steadily made new discoveries while also expanding the resources on its flagship property.
White Gold, which enjoys financial and technical backing of majors like Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd. (19.5%) and Kinross Gold Corp. (15%), turned its attention in 2023 to further evaluation of prospective targets at its JP Ross and Betty projects, as well as conduct initial diamond drilling on the Cali target on the Nolan property in a push to add more gold resources to this emerging district.
While exploration activities were in the pipeline, the company began 2023 with the significant announcement of updating its mineral resource estimate for the White Gold project that included the first calculation for the Ryan's Surprise target and included the VG deposit on the neighboring QV property. According to this calculation, the White Gold project now hosts 16.11 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 2.23 grams per metric ton gold (1.15 million ounces) gold; and 18.99 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 1.54 g/t gold (942,400 oz) gold.
With the addition of Ryan's Surprise and the VG deposit, White Gold has never been more certain of its exploration approach.
"The White Gold project now ranks amongst the largest primarily open pit deposits at such high grades in Canada owned by an exploration company," said White Gold CEO David D'Onofrio. "The updated and increased resource is a testament to the success of our technical team, our systematic data driven exploration methodologies and the expansiveness of gold mineralization in the White Gold District."
To continue this work, the company outlined a strategic 4,000-meter drilling program for the year that hoped to elevate some of its earlier-staged assets.
The 2023 program included 3,200 meters of diamond drilling between three targets – Betty Ford, Vertigo and Cali; 800 meters of rotary air blast drilling on the Wolf and Toonie targets; induced polarization geophysical surveys over the large early-stage Bridget and Hayes copper-molybdenum porphyry targets; and regional exploration on other prospects that included geological mapping and prospecting, soil geochemistry surveys, and ground magnetics and electromagnetic geophysical surveys to generate new targets for future drilling.
Despite a relatively small program, the results paid off. Rolling in around the beginning of September, five holes drilled at Vertigo tested the mineralized zone near previous trenching and drilling successfully identified two primary fault and vein arrays.
Overall, this allowed the company to better understand the structural interpretation of the known mineralization controls at Vertigo.
The results from Betty Ford, however, came a bit more sporadically. Even still, each result warranted an exciting change in White Gold's understanding of the structural and geological setting of Betty Ford.
Diamond drilling at Betty Ford consisted of four holes totaling 1,165 meters to further evaluate the zone of near-surface high-grade gold mineralization encountered in 2021 (50 meters averaging 3.46 g/t gold in hole BETFD21D003) and in 2022 (18.29 meters averaging 8.94 g/t gold in hole BETFD22RC004.
Highlights from the 2023 drilling at Betty Ford include:
• 8.3 meters averaging 1.2 g/t gold in hole BETFD23D012.
• 53 meters averaging 3.38 g/t gold in hole BETFD23D013.
• 46.5 meters averaging 2.96 g/t gold in hole BETFD23D014.
"When interpreted alongside the broader regional geology of the property, the Betty Ford target and Betty property represent a high priority target for generating future mineral resources within the evolving White Gold District," White Gold Exploration Manager Cameron Norton said in November.
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