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

Riversgold Ltd. Feb. 1 announced that it has staked 52 state mining claims over the Gemuk Mountain gold prospect in the Kuskokwim Mountains of Southwest Alaska. These newly staked claims are along strike from the newly-formed Australia-based company’s Luna-Quicksilver gold project.

Gemuk is near the intersection of the Denali-Farewell Fault, one of the major bounding structures of the Tintina Gold Belt, and North Fork Fault, a district-scale structure.

The gold potential was first recognized at Gemuk during a district-wide stream sediment and rock chip sampling survey conducted by the US Department of the Interior in 1970. Samples collected at that time returned 82, 94 and 100 parts per million gold.

In 2005, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management geologists collected 13 rock chip samples at Gemuk over a roughly 450-acre area. Two clusters of samples 900 meters apart returned assays of up to 71.4, 81.7 and 98.5 ppm gold, along with anomalous silver, arsenic and high-grade stibnite.

Riversong said its proprietary aeromagnetic data shows that the high-grade rock chip samples taken at Gemuk are located on the same northeast trending interpreted structure that hosts outcropping high-grade gold mineralization at Quicksilver, about 12.5 miles to the southwest.

Rock chip samples from outcropping mineralization at Quicksilver returned up to 37.5 grams per metric ton gold; rock chip samples from Luna returned up to 64.7 g/t gold; and massive sulfide mineralization with up to 1 percent copper, 90 g/t silver and 1 g/t gold has been identified at Luna East.

This outcropping gold mineralization is located along a roughly 25 miles of the North Fork structure, most of which are blanketed by Riversong held mining claims.

Riversgold said it plans to begin exploring for intrusion-related gold mineralization on its Alaskan projects during this summer and will conduct systematic geochemical and geophysical surveys over the Gemuk property with the aim of defining targets for future drill testing.

–SHANE LASLEY