Gold Fields may sell smaller mines after Osisko acquisition
The Johannesburg-based gold miner is shifting focus to advancing its new Salares Norte mine in Chile.
Snowline Gold (TSXV: SGD) reported drill results adding “significant” tonnage to its Rogue project, one of the highlights of surging activity in the Tombstone Gold Belt in Yukon.
At the Valley deposit, hole V-23-049 cut 539.4 metres grading 1.2 grams gold per tonne from surface including 2.41 grams over 151.5 metres, Snowline said in a news release on Thursday. Hole V-23-050 returned 423.3 metres at 1.08 grams from surface including 1.45 grams over 252 metres.
The assays showing grades of more than 1 gram per tonne over several hundred metres “are proving to be commonplace and very consistent across a large geographical footprint,” Snowline CEO Scott Berdahl said in the release. “V-23-050 returned such intervals from what was previously considered to be the northeastern edge of Valley’s main near-surface mineralized zone, thus adding significant tonnage of known mineralized rock.”
The new assays build on near-record drill results reported in August. Although there is no resource estimate yet for Rogue, it has the highest consistent grades among a slew of early-stage projects on the Tombstone belt. These include Sitka Gold (CSE: SIG), Banyan Gold (TSXV: BYN) and St. James Gold (TSXV: LORD). Major B2Gold (TSX: BTO) invested into Snowline in March and its stock nearly doubled before easing this autumn.
Snowline has still to report the majority of its more than 15,000 metres of drilling at Valley this year, which is still underway. It’s part of an 18,000-metre program encompassing the Rogue, Einarson, Ursa and Cynthia projects. Supporters appear largely unfazed the project lacks direct road and power connections. It lies near the border with the Northwest Territories, some 223 km east of the nearest town, Mayo.
Hole V-23-049 at Valley is in coarse-grained granodiorite and crosses several small porphyritic dikes before encountering a larger porphyritic body from roughly 365-420 metres downhole, Snowline said. It was collared as a 71-metre step back along section and perpendicular to the dominant trend of mineralization from hole V-22-007.
That hole cut 410 metres at 1.89 grams from surface including 146 metres at 3.24 grams, Snowline reported last year.
Hole V-23-050 is entirely within coarse-grained granodiorite apart from a porphyritic body intersected from roughly 340-408 metres downhole, Snowline said. It’s collared as a 66-metre step-out along strike to the northwest of V-22-029. That hole cut 558.7 metres at 1.26 grams including 202 metres at 2.04 grams, Snowline said in February.
Gold at the 940-sq.-km Rogue is associated with bismuthinite and telluride minerals hosted in sheeted quartz vein arrays within and along the margins of a 1-km mid-Cretaceous-aged Mayo-suite intrusion, Snowline said.
Rogue hosts multiple intrusions similar to Valley and Snowline says it has district-scale potential. The Tombstone belt holds the Yukon’s only operating hard rock gold mine, run by Victoria Gold (TSX: VGCX), and Kinross Gold’s (TSX: K; NYSE: KGC) Fort Knox mine in Alaska.
