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Survey sparks claim staking in Southcentral Exploration company adds 80 square miles of mining claims to project near Paxson Patricia Jones Petroleum News Contributing Writer
Nevada Star Resource Corp. spent this spring staking 80 square miles of mining claims to add to its neighboring 150-square mile MAN project, a platinum group land block located on the south flank of the Alaska Range in Southcentral Alaska.
The Vancouver, B.C.-based junior exploration company announced on May 8 its Fish Lake addition, which gives Nevada Star a total of more than 230 square miles — 145,000 acres — of land to prospect for platinum, palladium, nickel and copper deposits in the rugged but mostly road-accessible terrain.
“Staking priorities were based on known mineral occurrences, favorable geology and a newly released aeromagnetic survey of the project area by the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys,” said Nevada Star president Gerald Carlson, in a May 8 news release.
DGGS, working with funding from the Bureau of Land Management, released on March 3 airborne geophysical data for more than 600 square miles in the Denali Block area near Paxson. That, combined with a recent land transfer from the federal government to the state of Alaska, sparked mining interest in the area. Spending $1.5 million this year In addition to claim staking, Nevada Star’s current work on the MAN project includes a ground geophysical survey, started in early May. That work includes 100 line miles of grid, including a ground loop electromagnetic survey (UTEM), Carlson said in a May 1 press release.
That work is designed to identify drill targets, which the company plans to complete in its summer exploration program, funded by $1.5 million recently raised by Nevada Star in a non-brokered private placement, according to an April 28 press release.
Carlson is well known within Alaska’s mining industry as president of the former LaTeko Resources, which explored in the early to mid 1990s the Ryan Lode Mine and the True North deposit. Kinross Gold, which acquired LaTeko’s land assets in 1999, is currently producing gold from True North and has an active exploration program planned for Ryan Lode this summer. Lots of targets Even without the Fish Lake addition, Nevada Star had plenty of exploration targets to work on at the MAN project. Five other distinct targets are included in the land package — Dunite Hill is where the ground survey is being conducted. The others are called Canwell, Rainy, Broxson and Eureka.
“They’ve got the vast majority of ground that’s perspective there — an enormous claim block and they’ve got good targets,” said Curt Freeman, a Fairbanks-based consulting geologist who has worked in the area in past years.
In the last three years companies shifted focus from the area’s nickel and copper occurrences to exploring for platinum and palladium values, Freeman said. “PGE prices spiked up and people realized these were metals with strong demand.”
In addition, targets at MAN range from areas where some previous drilling has been conducted, to potential drill targets needing a first look underground, to wide-open areas that haven’t been prospected, he said.
That variety, combined with good access for infrastructure, will make the MAN property “the kind of thing that companies will be looking at,” Freeman said.
The state-organized airborne geophysical survey released in early March revealed some “beautiful targets,” said Dick Swainbank, mineral specialist in the Alaska Department of Community and Economic Development. “There’s potential for large platinum-palladium occurrences.” Claim staking sparked by survey Steve Borell, executive director of the Alaska Miners Association, noted the large Denali Block claim staking and its related economic impact in a May 2 letter to the Alaska Senate Finance Committee co-chairs, asking for continued support of the state-funded geophysical surveys.
“I estimate that the filing fees and claim rental for those claims totaled approximately $40,000. That money is now in the State General Fund,” Borell said. “Also, each year these claims are retained, a total of approximately $36,000 in claim rental will come to the state and this does not include the annual labor that must be done in the field, thus creating jobs for Alaskans.”
The Alaska Legislature is considering a request for $500,000 in funding for the 2003 airborne survey program.
“These airborne geophysical surveys have been an important catalyst that have encouraged mineral investment in Alaska,” Borell said, in his letter.
Starting in 1993, the state has spent $5 million to conduct airborne surveys and follow-up ground geological and geochemical work on more than 8,500 square miles of land throughout Alaska. BLM has spent some $1.6 million to fly approximately 4,000 square miles of land. The two total about 2 percent of Alaska, according to David Szumigala, senior minerals geologist at DGGS.
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