Special Report: Golden State Mining has three core gold and base metals projects — Yule in the Pilbara, Cue in the Murchison region and Four Mile Well in the northern Goldfields near Laverton — which have had history of mining or very compelling geology.

This is packaged together into a WA explorer with just 36 million shares on issue.

For ASX-listed explorers, it is a good idea to keep it simple — try and stick to projects that work well and which investors understand, managing director Mike Moore told Stockhead.

“Investors definitely understand gold and they definitely understand the opportunities and risk of operating in somewhere like WA, which is obviously a very low risk jurisdiction,” he said.

“The great thing about gold is that everybody can see the price — it is very easy to follow.”

He added that the company was focused on being sensible with exploration dollars and doing good, behind-the-scenes technical work to substantiate the opportunities that it had.

 

Pilbara Exploration

Golden State Mining’s (ASX:GSM) 434sqkm Yule project consists of three exploration tenements in the Pilbara, about 50km from Port Hedland, which are prospective for gold, base metals and rare earth elements.

Yule South includes ground that was originally pegged for its tantalum potential by famous prospector Graeme Hutton, who was also the co-founder of exploration success story Sandfire Resources (ASX:SFR).

“But then the iron ore boom happened, Graeme passed away and everyone forgot the fundamental reason why he pegged the ground because everybody got obsessed with iron ore,” Moore said.

“The ground languished in another junior quite some time.

“But our chairman Damien Kelly, who worked with Graeme in the early 2000s, always remembered Graeme’s enthusiasm for this particular ground.

“So, he pegged it and literally two weeks after, I rang him and said that I had access to some ground in the Murchison (Cue) and was on my way to building a portfolio of assets that were appropriate for listing.”

Moore described Yule as a large, greenfields (untouched) exploration target where the company had already received some good geophysical results in the past weeks.

The explorer will now carry out more geophysical work with the goal of defining drill targets.

More recently, the company identified a large bedrock conductor measuring 900m by 750m and about 150m below the surface that underlies anomalous nickel-cobalt geochemical results at the Balla Yule prospect within the Yule North tenement.

“The plan is to get better definition on that target and we will be doing a fixed loop electromagnetic survey, which will give us some greater clarity and if that substantiates what we saw in the first survey, then it will give us a much clearer target to direct the drilling activities,” Moore said.

“We have heritage surveys to complete there, and once that is done and we get a good weather window, the intention is to drill that conductor.”

 

Golden Opportunity

The Cue project is in the Murchison, a region that has produced over 7 million ounces of gold over the past 126 years.

It consists of the highly prospective Big Bell South, Cuddingwarra and Cue targets

At Cuddingwarra, where its first field program delivered encouraging gold-in-soil anomalies, Golden State has carried out mapping and geochemical surveys aimed at working up some drill targets.

Recent broad-spaced drilling at the Light of Asia prospect within Cue has also confirmed the presence of the gold mineralised structure, about 500m north of some historical workings.

This historic mine, called Light of Asia, produced about 30,000 ounces of gold between 1911 and 1922.

Meanwhile drilling at The Patch prospect returned a near-surface, high-grade intersection of 4m at 7.5 grams per tonne gold.

Anything above 5g/t is generally considered high grade.

The Patch is within a historical mining area about 1000m by 200m that contains numerous shallow gold mineralised quartz veins.

 

Near-term Drilling Ahead

Golden State’s Four Mile Well gold and nickel project, directly north of the 1.3moz Lancefield Mine, is the target of considerable activity.

Geochemical work by the company has delineated a 1.6km trend with anomalous gold results.

“The focus for us up to now has been geochemical surveys and rock chip sampling but our intention is to try and drill up there in the next six weeks,” Moore told Stockhead.

Bedrock Conductor at Balla Yule in the Pilbara, (Supplied).
Drilling at Light of Asia, (Supplied).
Golden State Mining’s projects (Supplied).

 

This story was developed in collaboration with Golden State Resources, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.
This story does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.

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