I'm just back from the Vancouver Cambridge House show, where I had a good look at a couple of companies in the Tintina gold belt in the Yukon. The Tintina is an arc of gold-prospective geographic area that stretches from Donlin Creek in western Alaska, through Teck Cominco's Pogo and Kinross's Fort Knox in eastern Alaska, and on through the Klondike in the Yukon. Northern Freegold and Northern Tiger are two companies on the eastern side of this belt, and both seem to have made significant insights this year into the geological processes that are producing very widespread gold mineralization, with large nuggets and wire gold, both signs of nearby hard rock gold sources, turning up in the nearby creeks where placer miners have been working for almost a century.
Northern Freegold a few years back consolidated a huge land package of historic mining claims in the area that exceeds the size of Manhattan, and has several significant drilled resource areas, the most interesting of which appears to be their Nucleus zone. Just recently they hit 410 g/t (12 ounces/tonne)over 1.27 m and 4m of 68.95 g/t. Much smaller market cap Northern Tiger, which has a property to the north and properties adjacent to Western Copper's Carmacks deposit and Sherwood Copper's high grade Minto deposit, got approximately 5 g/t over 25 meters in much smaller scale exploratory drilling.
Interestingly enough, it looks like both these companies got these excellent results this year when it occured to them to try drilling not along what they thought was a north-south mineralizing fault, but rather along east-west trending ultramafic contact zones. The theory is that the contact point between the ultramafics and gneiss formed some sort of barrier where mineralizing fluids gathered and concentrated the gold. What is perhaps more intriguing is that with magnetic imaging, they have a good idea where to drill next. Gold is apparently a replacement mineral for magnetite so that they are more or less found mutually exclusively. The imaging shows where there is no magnetite along the ultramafic contact and some good drill targets (in areas that have already shown to have strong geochemical readings for gold).
More positive for these two companies is that infrastructure in the form of power lines and possibly expanded roads is being evaluated and planned for to extend to Western Copper's Casino property, which is currently being permitted and is about 30-50 km to the north-west. This infrastructure makes the properties much more attractive because the threshold for coming up with economic projects when roads and power are not major capex items.
Overall, the gold/copper mineralization in this area of the Tintina is quite widespread and the possibility of very large tonnage in the area in aggregate if not single deposits seems that it would certainly be catching the interest of majors as drilling may significantly expand the known mineralized areas of Nucleus or Sonora Gulch this summer (although I think that both companies will be relatively conservative in their expenditures this year given the climate for raising money). |
