The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Mining Explorers 2024 - January 15, 2025
Freegold's 2024 drill program at Golden Summit focused primarily on expanding the resource ahead of a pre-feasibility study for this nearly 25-million-ounce gold project in Alaska.
Having already outlined 25 million ounces of gold at Golden Summit, Freegold Ventures Ltd. focused its 2024 drill program on expanding the already world-class Dolphin-Cleary deposit to the west as it prepares for the start of a pre-feasibility study for this road-accessible project about 25 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska.
According to a calculation completed in September, Dolphin-Cleary hosts 23.8 million oz of open-pit mineable gold in all resource categories, plus 1.1 million oz of underground mineable gold.
The resources outlined within the deposit are divided into three groups – open-pit mineable oxide resources, open-pit mineable primary resources, and deeper under-pit resources.
Here is the resource calculation by group:
• Oxide (at a 0.15 grams per metric ton cutoff grade): 59.41 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 0.49 g/t (937,000 oz) gold; plus 3.25 million metric tons of inferred resources averaging 0.45 g/t (47,000 oz) gold.
• Primary (0.5 g/t cutoff): 346.3 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 1.08 g/t (12.05 million oz) gold; plus 308.31 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 1.04 g/t (10.31 million oz) gold.
• Under-pit (0.75 g/t cutoff): 2.87 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 1.29 g/t (119,000 oz) gold; plus 22.9 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 1.34 g/t (986,000 oz) gold.
The 37-hole program carried out last year primarily targeted a large gold-in-soil anomaly that extends for 1,500 meters, or nearly a mile, southwest of the deposit. Given that this expansion area is roughly the same size as the current deposit, the resource expansion potential in this area is immense.
Highlights from the 2024 drilling in the westward expansion target include:
• 65.9 meters averaging 4.63 g/t gold from a depth of 692.1 meters in hole GS2401, including a three-meter subsection averaging 85.9 g/t (2.76 oz/t) gold.
• 45 meters averaging 5.51 g/t gold from a depth of 545 meters in hole GS2402, including a three-meter subsection averaging 67 g/t (2.15 oz/t) gold, and 15.6 meters averaging 3.74 g/t gold from 604.4 meters.
• 115.2 meters averaging 3.36 g/t gold from a depth of 45.8 meters, 49.5 meters averaging 0.96 g/t gold from 231.3 meters, and 25.7 meters averaging 1.22 g/t gold from 444.3 meters in hole GS2406.
• 28.9 meters averaging 2.29 g/t gold from a depth of 119.5 meters, 40.8 meters averaging 1.9 g/t gold from 330.4 meters, and 87.4 meters averaging 1.59 g/t gold from 522.4 meters in hole GS2407.
• 5.7 meters averaging 1.76 g/t gold from a depth of 241.4 meters, 17.1 meters averaging 1.17 g/t gold from 341.8 meters, and 42 meters averaging 3.06 g/t gold from 528 meters in hole GS2408.
The orientation of gold mineralization is shifting as drilling traces gold mineralization west of the current resource, which has resulted in an adjustment in Freegold's targeting strategy.
With the mineralization in the central part of the Dolphin-Cleary deposit dipping to the south, most holes drilled there and in the westward expansion area have been angled to the north to cut across the mineralization. As the drilling gets closer to Newsboy – a mine near the southwest end of the expansion area that produced roughly 40,000 oz of gold from ore averaging around 1oz/t (31 g/t) gold during intermittent mining from 1911 to 1932 – the mineralization is shifting to a north-dipping orientation observed at the historic mine.
During the 2024 season, Freegold began drilling this area with vertical holes to better understand the geometry of gold mineralization and to determine where the shift in orientation occurs.
Ongoing metallurgical, baseline environmental, cultural resource, and wetland studies continued through the 2024 season as Freegold prepares to initiate a prefeasibility study that details the economic parameters of developing a mine within a smaller high-grade starter pit within the world-class Dolphin-Cleary deposit on the Golden Summit project adjacent to Kinross Gold Corp.'s Fort Knox mine in Alaska.
In addition to Golden Summit, Freegold's portfolio includes Shorty Creek, an earlier-stage exploration project that lies alongside the paved Elliot Highway about 75 miles northwest of Fairbanks with the potential to host large porphyry-style deposits enriched with copper, gold, silver, tungsten, and cobalt.
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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