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

Contango Ore Inc. Nov. 17 said it has raised US$5.3 million through the exercise of 587,500 warrants.

The holders of these warrants were offered a 10 percent discount to early exercise the warrants for cash to provide the company with financial flexibility.

In an unrelated transaction, 62,500 warrants were exercised in a cashless exercise at their original US$10 exercise price.

"We are pleased with the large number of warrants recently exercised, which dramatically changed the company's cash position, which now exceeds US$6 million as of Nov. 17, 2016," said Contango Ore President Brad Juneau.

Another 580,999 Contango Ore warrants remain outstanding.

The company also reported the conclusion of the third and final phase of 2016 drilling at the Tetlin gold project near Tok, Alaska.

Overall, the 2016 program at Tetlin - conducted by Peak Gold, LLC, a joint venture between Contango Ore and a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Gold Inc. - included 20,523 meters of drilling in 118 holes.

The phase-3 drill program, which included 37 holes, focused on the North Peak zone at Tetlin.

The company reported results from 21 of those holes, highlights include: 5.49 meters averaging 29.53 grams per metric ton gold from a depth of 17.37 meters in hole TET16281; 14.31 meters of 11.59 g/t gold from a depth of 7.32 meter in TET16281; 25.48 meters of 18.73 g/t gold from a depth of 10.52 meters and 16.58 meters of 13.52 g/t gold from a depth of 39.12 meters of TET16289; and 14.99 meters of 11.67 g/t gold from 5.66 meters in TET16295.

Contango Ore said the North Peak zone remains open to northwest and southeast, as the last holes in these directions were still in gold bearing skarn.

As of 2013, the Main Peak deposit hosted 6 million metric tons of indicated resources averaging 3.46 g/t (664,112 ounces) gold, 11 g/t silver and 0.25 percent copper, or 1.2 gold-equivalent ounces.

Since that time, Peak Gold has had two years of increasingly successful drilling in the Main Peak, Connector and North Peak zones.

This drilling has substantially increased the footprint of the Peak zones and has encountered the highest grade gold mineralization on the property to date.

"We remain encouraged by the joint venture's drilling results and technical expertise provided by Royal Gold," said Juneau.

"We look forward to releasing a resource estimate of the joint venture's Alaskan gold deposit in the spring of calendar year 2017."