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Freegold Ventures acquires Yukon property Junior exploration company signs option on Grew Creek Gold Project, plans August drilling Patricia Liles Petroleum News Contributing Writer
Freegold Ventures announced July 14 that it has signed an option agreement to earn a 100 percent interest in the Grew Creek gold property, 35 kilometers (21.7 miles) west of the historical mining town of Ross River in the southeastern part of the Yukon Territory.
The Vancouver, British Columbia-based junior exploration company plans to begin diamond core drilling on the 7,500 acre property in August, starting with a 10-hole program, the company said.
About 2,000 meters (6,561 feet) will be completed during the first phase of work on the property, according to Peter Dasler, a spokesman for Freegold. Drilling will target known mineralization previously drilled, as well as other new zones called Rat Creek and Tarn.
Past work has identified a mineral resource of 773,012 tonnes, with an average grade of 8.9 grams of gold per ton and 33.6 grams of silver per ton.
The Grew Creek property, one kilometer off the Robert Campbell Highway, which links Carmacks with Ross River and Watson Lake in a southeasterly route following the Pelly River, is also near the Whitehorse power grid.
“The property covers a sequence of Eocene volcanic and sedimentary rocks preserved within a graven formed by the Tintina Fault System,” Freegold said. “Gold and silver mineralization at Grew Creek is hosted by highly permeable felsic pyroclastic tuff.” Research done on property in late 1990s Freegold said the property consists of 192 mining claims within the Tintina fault, which stretches in an arc from southeastern Yukon Territory across the U.S.-Canadian border and through Interior Alaska.
“Unlike the gold occurrences of Interior Alaska, Grew Creek is thought to be an epithermal deposit, meaning it formed at lower temperature, nearer surface and normally something that deposited gold when the fluids rose into a lower pressure zone and boiled, dropping the gold and silver as minerals from solutions,” said Curt Freeman, Freegold’s geological consultant based in Fairbanks, Alaska. “These types of occurrences can be extremely high grade and that is a big plus in this part of the world.”
His company, Avalon Development, conducted research on the property in the late 1990s, although work slowed when market prices for gold dropped. The property currently has a small gold resource calculated, Freeman said. “The real key at Grew is to look for the higher-grade new resources.”
Freegold Ventures has several active gold exploration projects in Interior Alaska and has a joint venture agreement with Lonmin for its platinum property in Southeast Alaska, called Union Bay.
Editor’s note: For more details about this story, see the Aug. 8 issue of North of 60 Mining News.
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