Early drilling results suggest WA explorer Golden Mile (ASX:G88) has intersected a high-grade mineralised system beneath a cluster of old gold workings.
There’s clearly a lot of high-grade gold still to be found exploring around Australia’s countless historic mines.
Dozens of small cap explorers proved that last year.
Often, these mines weren’t explored using modern techniques and the cut-off grade (the minimum grade required in order for a mineral or metal to be mined economically) back in the day was a lot, lot higher.
That means a lot of what we now consider ‘high-grade’ gold mineralisation remains in the ground.
And of course gold prices are near all-time highs, making it the ideal time to dust off an old project.
WA-based explorer Golden Mile is the latest minnow to uncover fresh gold around ancient gold workings.
The Wildcat prospect, part of the Monarch Gold trend near Leonora, is dotted with a large number of shallow historical gold workings dating back to the 1900s.
Most of these had not previously been recorded, surveyed or explored using modern exploration techniques, Golden Mile says. Until now.
Early drilling results now suggest Golden Mile has hit a “high-grade mineralised system”.
Golden Mile’s discovery – including hits like 1m at 76.4 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 37 m, and 8m at 2.58g/t gold from 28 m — is 150m long and ‘open’ in all directions:
Wildcat is now a priority area for further drilling.
“We believe this could be a system with some size,” Golden Mile managing director Lachlan Reynolds told Stockhead.
“But given its location, [near the mining hub of Leonora] it doesn’t need to be a super huge deposit in order to be something that can be potentially developed.”
It’s still very early days though.
“We’ve done the basics, had some early hits and now we need to follow up,” Reynolds says.
“We clearly need to drill deeper. There really are no drilling intersections deeper than 40m to 50m below surface.
Reynolds says the best approach to exploration will be to step out ‘from the known to the unknown’, and follow this structure as far as it can.
“There’s lots of opportunity to test it at depth and also to extend it along strike,” he says.
“And we also have another +10km of prospective strike [along Monarch] that we still have to test.
“The opportunity is ahead of us.”
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In other ASX gold news today:
Empire Resources (ASX:ERL) has hit highly encouraging anomalous copper and gold during shallow, early stage drilling at the Yuinmery copper-gold and Penny’s Find gold projects in WA.
“The results of this drilling campaign demonstrate the merit in the systematic approach the company has taken in advancing its exploration assets,” managing director Sean Richardson says.
The company says follow-up deeper drilling “is warranted” at both projects to pinpoint the high-grade sources of this mineralisation.