North of 60 Mining News - The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North

Teryl Resources Corp. continues to prospect on ground nearby the Fort Knox mine northeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, this time drilling on some placer claims with historical gold occurrences just downstream from the mine's fresh water dam.

Reverse circulation drilling has started on 25 placer drill holes, vertical eight-inch diameter holes on two lines, according to the company's Aug. 4 press release.

Each line will contain 10 to 15 drill holes, spaced 50 to 200 feet apart and from 45 to 75 feet deep, penetrating bedrock by up to five feet, according to the company's exploration application with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources. The lines cut across the Fish Creek drainage in a northwest-southeast angle. Drilling is designed to test two anomalies, located during a magnetic survey completed in 2003, which indicate a potential buried placer gold-bearing channel.

Teryl said extremely high-grade placer gold was encountered upstream of the Fish Creek property, during excavation of the Fort Knox mine fresh water dam in the early 1990s.

The company, and its 50 percent partner in the Fish Creek claims, Linux Gold, also plans to drill two lode holes during the placer drilling program. Two vertical five-inch holes will be drilled up to 200 feet in depth, along the east flank of the Fish Creek valley, about 2,000 feet below the Fort Knox dam, according to the exploration permit application.

That work is designed to test the lithology and to analyze soils for concentrations of precious and base metals, according to the press release.

Soil auger results

Teryl also released results on Aug. 4 from 20 soil auger holes, drilled on Odden Creek on July 13 near a suspected buried intrusive. The goal was to identify soils anomalous in pathfinder elements indicative of precious metal lodes relating to the Fort Knox gold deposit, and to identify more drill targets.

Of the 20 holes, 11 reached the "C" soil horizon and of these, eight penetrated underlying bedrock. One encountered felsic intrusive, one graphitic slate and the others hit quartz muscovite schist.

Several clustered holes on the west side of Odden Creek, including the intrusive, are anomalous in silver, lead, arsenic and bismuth; important indicator elements for the Fort Knox intrusive-hosed gold deposit, the company said.

The hole that penetrated the graphitic slate is anomalous in zinc, arsenic, iron, sulfur and tungsten, possibly indicating a sulfide deposit, the company said.

Four of the remaining holes terminated at the maximum depth of seven and one-half feet without reaching the "C" soils horizon and the other five encountered frozen soils two feet below the surface.

In a July 12 press release, the company announced plans to conduct a 40-hole auger program on a 200-foot grid.