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

Over the past six years, Goldstrike Resources Ltd. have been finding zones rich in visible gold across its 570-square kilometer (220 square miles) Plateau property in Yukon Territory - discoveries that have piqued the interest of Newmont Gold Corp. In March, Newmont cut a C$53 million deal to earn up to a 75 percent stake in the expansive and gold-rich Plateau property by paying Goldstrike C$8 million and investing C$38.8 million to explore the gold property over the next decade.

The agreement included a C$6 million private placement financing under which the gold-focused major purchased 12.71 million Goldstrike shares at C47.4 cents each.

"Goldstrike is now fully funded to move forward and unlock the full potential of the district-scale Plateau gold project," said Goldstrike President and CEO Terrence King.

The first step in unlocking this potential was flying a 10,000-line-kilometer magnetic survey across the entire property and a district-scale sampling program that utilized Newmont's proprietary reconnaissance geochemistry technique. This program, combined with high-resolution Radarsat-2 surface mapping and satellite imagery, was used to identify new exploration targets at Plateau.

While the partners were interpreting this data, they got busy drilling some of the exciting gold discoveries Goldstrike has made over the past six years.

Goldstack, one of Goldstrike's earliest discoveries at Plateau, was the first drill target of the 2017 program.

The discovery hole at Goldstack, drilled in 2013, cut a gold mineralized shoot averaging 10.91 grams-per-metric-ton gold over 10 meters within a larger intersection of 2.28 g/t gold over 53 meters.

The most abundant VG observed in Plateau core so far was drilled in PSGS-16-01, the first hole of an 11-hole drill program completed in 2016. This hole cut 45.5 meters averaging 6.05 g/t gold.

This drilling has traced a 10- to 17-meter-thick body of gold mineralization at Goldstack for about 130 meters along strike.

This year's drilling is designed to trace this dipping body of high-grade gold along strike and to depth.

The 2017 drill campaign also targeted Bonanza, a previously undrilled high-grade gold zone about 4,000 meters northwest of Goldstack. Goldstrike geologists discovered the most pervasive coarse visible gold seen in bedrock on the Plateau property, while investigating a small outcrop at Bonanza in 2016. One grab sample collected from this exposed bedrock returned 436.4 g/t gold. Further investigations turned up other high-grade showings in the area, indicating the potential of a large zone of mineralization there.

With Newmont shouldering the financial and technical load at Plateau, Goldstrike can turn its attention to Lucky Strike, a large property located in the heart of Yukon's White Gold District.

While the company has focused primarily on Plateau in recent years, early-stage work at Lucky Strike has identified five large gold-in-soil anomalies - Monte Carlo, Belmont, Samson, Boss and Maverick - along a 10-kilometer- (6 miles) corridor running across the property.

Monte Carlo, discovered in 2016, was the initial focus of the 2017 program.

One trench dug at this 1,400- by 350-meter geochemical anomaly last year cut 154 meters averaging 0.42 g/t gold. The trench is comparable to trenches dug at Goldcorp's Coffee gold project, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) to the southeast and White Gold Corp.'s Golden Saddle deposit, roughly 15 kilometers (9 miles) to the west.

Goldstrike hopes to tap a similar deposit at Monte Carlo.

-SHANE LASLEY