The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
North of 60 Mining News – March 1, 2024
Prospector Gary Lee (left), who co-discovered gold at Golden Culvert, and Stratabound Minerals CEO Kim Tyler at the discovery outcrop on this gold exploration project in eastern Yukon.
In recent market buzz about the emerging gold district in southeastern Yukon, one junior says its promising assets have been largely overlooked by investors, resulting in its shares being significantly undervalued.
Lode Gold Resources Ltd., known until January as Stratabound Mineral Resources Corp., says its name change signals ongoing growth and restructuring that will include further exploration of its Golden Culvert and recently discovered Win projects in the region.
Golden Culvert and Win are situated in a new 12- by 55-kilometer orogenic reduced intrusion-related gold system (RIRGS) district near the southern end of the prolific Tombstone Gold Belt.
An 800-kilometer- (496 miles) long corridor within the greater Tintina Gold Belt, Tombstone includes RIRGS-type deposits such as Fort Knox, Pogo, Brewery Creek, Dublin Gulch, and Snowline Gold Corp.'s major Valley gold discovery on the Rogue property in the Selwyn Basin.
In hopes of further unlocking value on its 99.5 square kilometers (38.4 square miles) of claims covering a 27-kilometer (17 miles) stretch of a district-scale, high-grade-gold-mineralized trend in the southern portion of the Tombstone Gold Belt, the newly renamed company is preparing to spin out its Yukon and New Brunswick orogenic gold exploration assets into a new company, Gold Orogen.
Lode Gold said new corporate websites are currently under construction, with the new domains http://www.lode-gold.com and http://www.goldorogen.com, respectively. The company's shares will remain on the TSX Venture Exchange under the new trading symbol "LOD."
The company said its new name also reflects other management and restructuring changes in 2023 and Lode Gold's plans for 2024.
The changes include the appointment of Wendy Chan as interim CEO and director to lead Lode Gold's restructuring, growth strategy and plans, and the appointment of Buddy Doyle as vice president of exploration to lead the exploration programs of several of the company's key assets.
Lode Gold also has welcomed a new strategic shareholder, The Tomlinson Group, the second of its two large shareholders, along with Coast Capital Management, a notable investor behind other juniors, including Jaguar Mining, TMAC, Tahoe, Oceanagold, Rubicon and Argonaut.
"Stratabound's new strategic direction and the key to unlocking shareholder value, focuses on separating its key assets, positioning new investors and building a strong team," Chan said in a statement. "We are putting together an execution-focused team of professionals at the corporate and board level to rebuild Stratabound.
"As gold hovers near historic highs, we are excited with the possibilities, "she added.
In December, the company confirmed the discovery of its Win gold project, a new RIRGS deposit located 11 kilometers (seven miles) south of Golden Culvert.
Stratabound Chairman Hashim Ahmed said, "This recent finding by Stratabound reaffirms our enduring geological model, indicating that the Win project has analogous mineralization roots with significant discoveries at Snowline and Rackla. In November 2020, our market capitalization stood at $30 million, driven solely by the Yukon and New Brunswick exploration assets. Now, with the incorporation of the US$200 million NPV (net present value) Fremont project in (California), Stratabound has become a more compelling option for investors keen on gold discovery and development."
The Fremont project is located in the Lode Gold Belt of central California.
Highlights of the Stratabound's 2023 exploration program in Yukon include identifying an outcrop of sheeted gold-bearing quartz veins at Win that feature distinctive patterns in surface rock geochemistry with gold values up to 8.53 grams per metric ton, silver values up to 155 g/t, and bismuth values up to 516 parts per million. The veins also contained significant lead, tellurium and cobalt values in the outer discovery zone and gold, bismuth, and tellurium values in the inner zone.
Three rock chip samples collected from a sheeted quartz vein outcrop yielded 8.53 g/t gold, 0.64 g/t gold and 0.18 g/t gold with associated antimony, arsenic, tellurium, tungsten, and bismuth mineralization a 3,000-meter-wide contact between two intrusives.
The outcrop is surrounded by a larger 8,000-meter ring of molybdenum-tungsten-indium assemblage.
A recent follow-up examination of the Win discovery led Lode Gold to collect a further six outcrop chip samples at an average 13-meter interval over a total 90-meter section along a single narrow quartz vein, which confirms results from 2022 exploration.
Lode Gold also noted that the Win project is located within five kilometers (three miles) of an all-season highway and 12.8 kilometers (about eight miles) south of the shuttered Cantung Mine, a skarn-type tungsten deposit in Northwest Territories consistent with RIRGS regional systems.
Lode Gold said Win's vertically dipping sheeted quartz vein array trends directly onto the company's Golden Culvert Main Discovery Zone and may be genetically related.
The transitioning gold exploration company said follow-up work at Win includes surface channel sampling and detailed mapping of the new discovery site that is expanding outwards regionally with airborne geophysical surveys to define known and identify new intrusives for ground-truthing in anticipation of drilling programs in 2024.
"Vectoring in on historic signature soil, stream and float rock geochemistry has led us back to this solid outcrop exposure of RIRGS-type gold-bearing sheeted quartz veins," said Stratabound President and CEO Kim Tyler. "As noted (previously), our focus to date has been on the orogenic-type gold deposit model; however given the recent spectacular results by Snowline Gold's RIRGS deposit-type target at its Rogue property, we have been compiling and reviewing compelling evidence for similar RIRGS potential on our own Tombstone Gold Belt properties."
Tyler says this includes recorded and unrecorded new intrusions that may be related to the other high-grade gold discoveries made on the company's properties to date.
"Moreover, we are greatly encouraged to discover that the strike and trend of the new sheeted veins project directly back in a near-perfect line 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) to our Golden Culvert corridor of six parallel gold-bearing quartz vein, breccia and wall-rock mineralized structures featuring drill-hole intersections up to 60.1 g/t gold over 0.9 meters within 2.53 g/t gold over 33 meters reported in our previous press release," he added. "Further follow-up work will examine the possible genetic link between both discoveries, deposit-types and remaining unexplored intrusives within our ground."
Golden Culvert is located about 205 kilometers (128 miles) north of the town of Watson Lake and parallel to and about 25 kilometers (16 miles) northeast of Seabridge Gold's 3 Aces Project.
Since acquiring the early-stage Golden Culvert property in 2017, Stratabound has completed detailed work on the original discovery site, including the first 25 diamond drill holes and 24 trenches ever done on the property.
This work confirmed the 130-meter-wide corridor of at least six parallel gold-bearing structures within a gold-in-soils anomaly that extends for at least 970 meters of strike and to at least 225 meters in depth and remains open beyond the original discovery site. Drill programs in 2018 and 2020 identified significant gold-bearing structures at Golden Culvert.
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