Following up on its success in 2016, Redstar Gold Corp. has gotten off to an early start on expanding the high-grade gold zones at its Unga project in Southwest Alaska.
The nearly 60,000-acre Unga property blankets two high-grade gold trends – Apollo-Sitka and Shumagin – that each cut roughly six miles across Unga Island.
Apollo-Sitka hosts Apollo, a historic mine that produced roughly 150,000 ounces of gold from 1892 to 1913. Shumagin, a parallel structural trend about 2,000 meters to the northwest, has been Redstar’s primary focus of exploration and is the starting point of the 2017 program.
"Based on the results and success from 2016, Redstar increased the drilled strike length of the Shumagin gold zone from approximately 300 meters to approximately 950 meters, and is now well-financed, excited, prepared and focused to execute a multi-million-dollar expansive exploration program to highlight the potential of the multiple gold zones with the Unga gold project, commencing firstly with the Shumagin gold zone," Redstar President and CEO Peter Ball said.
2016 success
The seven holes drilled during the fall 2016 program an Unga targeted the expansion of high-grade gold mineralization over a roughly 750-meter stretch of the Shumagin zone.
The first two holes, 16SH019 and 16SH020, tested the potential of expanding the high-grade zone deeper and to the southwest, both holes of which tapped the targeted structure.
16SH020, the most southwesterly hole drilled so far in the Shumagin zone, cut three gold intervals, including 0.9 meters of 14.95 grams per metric ton gold and 2.67 g/t silver.
The other five holes successfully tapped high-grade mineralization below weakly mineralized breccia exposed at Bunker Hill on the northeast end of the Shumagin zone. Highlights from the drilling in this area include 1.5 meters of 16.97 g/t gold in hole 16SH022; 0.3 meters of 34.5 g/t gold in 16SH023; and 0.9 meters of 11.65 g/t gold in 16SH024.
“Shumagin has once again delivered double digit gold grades consistently in almost every drill hole," Ball said.
Overall, this program extended the drilled section of the Shumagin zone to 950 meters and provided a launching point for the robust 2017 exploration program now underway.
Tracing Shumagin southwest
Redstar kicked off its 2017 program at Unga in early April with a surface geophysical program designed to refine targets southwest of the Shumagin zone for a 5,000-meter drill program slated to start later this month.
This program, which is now complete, included 15.73 line-kilometers (9.77 miles) of magnetic and 8.75 line-kilometers (5.44 miles) of induced polarization surveys across the Shumagin zone and 54.44 line-kilometers (33.83 miles) of magnetic survey at Orange Mountain, a large zone of alteration about 3,000 meters to the southwest along the longer Shumagin structural trend.
This work included surveying well-known geological features and high-grade gold mineralization already identified at the Shumagin zone, which will help identify other deeper, hidden targets towards Orange Mountain, which is believed to be the hydrothermal center that fed gold-bearing fluids to the Shumagin trend.
Using the data from the survey, the Redstar team will look for the best untested structures for drilling between Shumagin zone and Orange Mountain.
“Our technical team is now finalizing a drill targeting exercise, which we anticipate to complete in the next week, allowing drilling to commence in May,” Ball said on April 27.
In addition to drilling, Redstar plans to complete metallurgical work on the high-grade gold and silver mineralization across the Shumagin zone and continued exploration of the Apollo-Sitka trend this year.
