Gateway to a winner: Julias new shallow oxide gold zone

Gateway’s drilling has confirmed an emerging zone of shallow oxide gold mineralisation at the Julias target within its Gidgee gold project in Western Australia.

Assay results – such as 10m grading 3 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 38m and 12m at 2.4g/t gold from 60m in GRC763 and 11m at 2.6g/t gold from 11m in GRC762 – have confirmed this consistent zone of mineralisation just 5km from the existing 449,000oz resource at Gidgee.

Defining a new oxide gold zone is a big positive for Gateway Mining (ASX:GML) for at least two reasons, one being the potential to add further to resources and the other being the comparative ease of processing oxide mineralisation.

Validation

This new zone of mineralisation remains completely open to the north, where no drilling has been completed previously, and over 800m to the south where recent aircore drilling has returned hits such as 24m at 1.4g/t gold from 16m and 8m at 1.3g/t gold from 32m.

Adding interest, it validates the company’s strategy of discovering new gold deposits within 5km of Gidgee.

“This is an exciting breakthrough for Gateway which gets the New Year off to a flying start. We now have consistent broad widths of high-grade oxide gold mineralisation in RC drilling over a 500m zone at Julias – and the zone remains completely open to the north and south,” managing director Mark Cossom said.

“The ability to rapidly add shallow oxide ounces is a huge bonus for any emerging gold project, and we appear to have a large oxide system on our hands here at the Julias-Flametree target.

“Considering that we had wide zones of high-grade mineralisation in air-core drilling just 800m to the south at Flametree, this area clearly has huge potential.”

Drilling points to future excitement for Gateway

The 11-hole drill program follows up on recent air-core drilling at Julias and will infill and confirm the extent of previously intersected mineralisation.

This focused on the core 500m strike of the Julias target that was identified by historical Gateway drilling that was previously impeded to the north due to presence of a tenement boundary.

This impediment to drilling has since been addressed by the company, which now owns the entire strike corridor.

High-priority

Gateway notes that the intersected supergene-related gold mineralisation within the oxide weathered zone now represents a high-priority target for systematic drilling in early 2022.

An extensive aircore drill program will commence early February 2022 to continue to explore the strike extents of mineralisation to the north and south with a systematic RC program to follow in order to complete a regularised drill pattern over the core Julias target area.

This is intended to define a resource at Julias while continuing to scope out the potential of the broader system.

This article was developed in collaboration with Gateway Mining, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.