Mining News: Northern Neighbors: NWT incentive bolsters Yellowknife program

TerraX Minerals Inc. July 15 said it has begun a C$500,000 summer program at its Yellowknife City Gold project, immediately north of Northwest Territories’ capital city. This field work budget has been supplemented by a Northwest Territories Mineral Incentive Program grant worth more than C$120,000, bumping the total funding available for comprehensive surface programs this summer to C$620,000. The summer program will include comprehensive field mapping and rock sampling to identify extensions to new areas of mineralization such as the Mispickel zone, where the company recently reported an eight-meter drill intercept averaging 60.6 grams per metric ton gold. The Mispickel mineralized structure has been identified in geophysics and historical exploration reports over roughly 5,000 meters of strike length. An initial 5,000-meter drill program focused on extensional drilling on the Mispickel zone is tentatively scheduled to begin in early July. The company is investigating areas of historical trenching along the mineralized structure to the north of TerraX’s recently reported drilling. The summer program also will seek new areas of mineralization, particularly sulfide replacement-style zones similar TerraX’s discovery at Hebert-Brent, where channel sampling last year returned 11 meters averaging 7.55 g/t gold. The sulfide replacement target areas will be mapped, sampled, stripped and possibly channel sampled in preparation for drilling later in the summer. The company also plans to carry out mapping and sampling at the Southbelt property to follow up on 2015 surface sampling, which turned up grab samples of up to 94.9 g/t gold. TerraX anticipates this work will turn up targets for winter drilling in early 2017. “The discovery of replacement=style mineralization at Hebert-Brent last year, as well as the high-grade gold discovery at Mispickel this winter, has laid to rest the myth that there is no high-grade gold left to be discovered in this major Canadian mining camp,” said TerraX Minerals President Joe Campbell. Additionally, the 2016 summer program will include: detailed ground magnetic surveys over the remainder of the Mispickel structure not covered in the winter survey, and along the Sam Otto structure, a mineralized zone sub-parallel and 300 meters to the west of the Mispickel structure; a LiDAR survey over TerraX’s Southbelt property; and electromagnetic and magnetic surveys over sulfide replacement target areas and the Homer Lake gold and base metal area.

-Shane Lasley