Mining News: Northern Neighbors: Nighthawk launches drilling at Indin Lake gold

Nighthawk Gold Corp. March 3 announced the start of a 25,000-meter drill program at its Indin Lake gold project in the Northwest Territories. Roughly 125 miles north of Yellowknife, Indin Lake hosts a number of deposits, including the historical Colomac open-pit mine, which produced 527,908 ounces of gold during the 1990s. In 2013, Nighthawk reported an inferred mineral resource of 39.8 million metric tons averaging 1.64 grams per metric ton (2.1 million oz) gold. Roughly 2 million ounces of this gold is found at Colomac and Goldcrest, parallel trends of dikes and sills. The objectives of the 2017 drill campaign, Nighthawk’s largest program to date at Indin Lake, are to better define and expand the dimensions of higher-grade gold mineralization, test for the possible convergence of zones previously delineated, and explore areas surrounding the resource areas and across the district-scale property. Winter drilling has begun at Colomac Zone 1.5, where drilling in 2016 cut broad zones of high-grade gold mineralization. Highlights for the 2016 drilling at Zone 1.5 include: 52.07 meters of 7.72 grams per metric ton gold in hole C16-03; and 72.65 meters of 5.58 g/t gold in hole C16-03B. The 2017 drilling will test for depth and strike extensions of this zone. The initial phase of 2017 drilling will also test for a possible link between Zone 1.5 and high-grade Zone 2.0, another high-grade zone immediately to the south. Drilling is also planned for Goldcrest, a parallel trend about 250 meters west of Colomac. Extensive prospecting and mapping programs are planned for the summer field season and are directed at generating drill targets within the Nice Lake sill, a recently discovered trend about 1,500 meters east of Colomac, and to advance a number of regional showings and deposits to a drill ready status. “We are confident that our new understanding of the Colomac system will lead to additional discoveries of magnitude, even beyond those ounces that will be delivered into the planned 2017 resource update,” said Nighthawk President and CEO Michael Byron.

-Shane Lasley