The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Mining Explorers 2024 - January 15, 2025
Western Alaska Minerals completed 4,230 meters of drilling during the 2024 program at Illinois Creek.
Core from the silver- and lead-rich Galena zone cut a depth of 212.6 meters in hole IC24-0005.
Western Alaska Minerals Corp.'s 2024 exploration program at Illinois Creek focused on testing targets that lie between two established deposits at opposite ends of a roughly five-mile trend of carbonate replacement deposit (CRD) mineralization on this district-scale exploration project about 300 miles west of Fairbanks, Alaska.
Over the previous three seasons, Western had focused much of its exploration on Waterpump Creek, a silver-rich CRD deposit at Illinois Creek.
Based on 15,550 meters of drilling completed by Western Alaska and 7,900 meters of historical drilling by Anaconda and Novagold Resources, a calculation completed early in 2024 outlined 2.39 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 279 grams per metric ton (21.4 million ounces) silver, 11.25% (592 million pounds) zinc, and 9.84% (518 million lb) lead at Waterpump Creek.
The combined value of the metals within this resource comes to 75 million oz of silver-equivalent or 1.38 billion lb of zinc-equivalent.
At the opposite end of the CRD trend lies the Illinois Creek gold-silver deposit, which provided oxide ore for a heap leach mine that operated from 1997 to 2022. With mining cut short due to low precious metals prices at the time, the Illinois Creek deposit still contains 7.4 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 0.98 g/t (234,000 oz) gold and 32.7 g/t (7.8 million oz) silver; plus 3.1 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 1.02 g/t (102,000 oz) gold and 35.9 g/t (3.6 million oz) silver.
The transition from higher-temperature fluids depositing copper, gold, and silver found in and around Illinois Creek to lower-temperature fluids depositing silver, zinc, and lead at Waterpump Creek is a classic sign of district zonation patterns typical of porphyry to CRD systems.
"The CRD continuum model suggests the next steps are to link this to the distal silver-lead-zinc resource at Waterpump Creek and the more proximal gold-copper resource adjoining the historical Illinois Creek mine," Peter Megaw, a world-leading expert in CRD mineralizing systems and technical advisor to Western Alaska Minerals, explained.
Western's 2024 exploration program included 4,230 meters of drilling to test the Warm Springs (2,883 meters) and Last Hurrah (1,347 meters) links along the CRD trend.
The 2024 drilling at Warm Springs encountered an upper zone of gold-copper mineralization similar to Illinois Creek, which lies 1,400 meters to the west, and a deeper zone of strong silver-zinc-lead mineralization more akin to Waterpump Creek, which is about 6,000 meters to the north.
Highlights from the 2024 drilling at Warm Springs include:
Core from the silver- and lead-rich Galena zone cut a depth of 212.6 meters in hole IC24-0005.
• 4.7 meters averaging 1.29 g/t gold, 11.6 g/t silver, and 0.04% copper from a depth of 84.2 meters; and three meters averaging 2.13 g/t gold, 7 g/t silver, and 0.03% copper from a depth of 244.4 meters in hole IC24-0004.
• 1.2 meters averaging 687 g/t silver and 33.64% lead from a depth of 221.6 meters; and 3.2 meters averaging 88.5 g/t silver, 4% zinc, and 2.39% lead from a depth of 352.2 meters in hole IC24-0005.
The company says the zone of alteration and mineralization at Warm Springs is 10 times larger than Waterpump Creek, suggesting potential for a large CRD-style deposit.
"We are on to something with very large scale," said Western Alaska Minerals CEO Kit Marrs. "At Warm Springs we now have both scale and intervals of high-grade mineralization, a winning combination. And this is just the start."
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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