Golden Predator Mining Corp. March 5 announced the start of a 4,000-meter winter drill program at its 3 Aces gold project in southeastern Yukon.

The winter drilling will initially focus on stepping-out with wide-spaced drilling within the central core zone, a 13.5-square-kilometer (3,335 acres) area of the 3 Aces property that hosts multiple high-grade gold vein occurrences.

This wide-spaced drilling will test the continuity along favorable stratigraphic-structural contacts along the Hearts-Clubs corridor and from the Spades area, now believed to represent the down dip extension of the Hearts-Clubs corridor.

The Hearts-Club corridor is currently defined as a 1,600-meter structural zone with upper and lower northwest trending shear zones extending from the Ace of Hearts to the Ten of Clubs. The 2017 drilling along this corridor established continuity along shear zones hosting gold-in-quartz veins. A second lower parallel shear zone, within the Hearts-Clubs Corridor was also established and confirmed with visible gold along a 450-meter segment.

Results from 2017 drilling along the Hearts-Club Corridor include 19.81 meters of 3.32 grams per metric ton gold from a depth of 10.67 meters in hole 3A17-203; and 4.57 meters of 81.35 g/t gold from a depth of 0.76 meters in 3A17-208.

"Closing out 2017, we made a significant breakthrough that enables us to explain nearly all the gold occurrences in the 3 Aces area using a single unifying conceptual model. Our team realized some time ago that there was a common thread uniting the many seemingly isolated gold showings in the 3 Aces area and they have been working to integrate our exploration results to find the common links," said Golden Predator CEO Janet Lee-Sheriff.

Winter drilling in the Central Core Area is intended to test the company's conceptual model ahead of planned work along the Sprogge-Central Core trend as a part of the summer drill program.

Late in 2017, Golden Predator cut deals with Alexco Exploration Canada Corp. and Newmont Canada Corp. to buy full ownership of Sprogge, a large gold property adjacent to 3 Aces.

Golden Predator said Sprogge has the same geological setting as 3 Aces' central core area and is likely the strike extension of the same favorable structural-stratigraphic contacts that host gold occurrences in the zone. The company says these contacts can be traced from Sprogge through the Central Core Area and projected to the Reef and Hy-Jay gold occurrences more than 35 kilometers (22 miles) to the north.

Work by previous operators found multiple high-grade gold occurrences including a 1,400- by 800-meter zone defined by bedrock chips with numerous samples in excess of 10 g/t gold.

"As we suspected, all of the key elements (host rocks, structural controls and gold) associated with high grade mineralization at the central core area are also found at Sprogge," said Lee-Sherriff. "With the acquisition of Sprogge we are now positioned to aggressively test our model and explore the potential for a district-scale mining camp along 3 Aces' prospective 35 km strike length."

Golden Predator is planning to follow-up the winter program with 1,300 meters of drilling this summer for a total of 17,000 meters of drilling in 2018.

–SHANE LASLEY