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

Aben Resources Ltd. May 23 announced that it will have drills turning at the Justin gold project in southeastern Yukon and Forrest Kerr gold project in the Golden Triangle region of British Columbia.

This year, the company plans to get an earlier start on exploration with a roughly 2,000-meter drill program at Justin beginning in early June. This program will include prospecting, 600 meters of rotary air blast drilling and 1,350 meters of core drilling.

The RAB drilling at will target Lost Ace, a high-grade gold zone discovered on the Justin property in 2017.

Aben's 2018 program at Justin included the collection of 19 channel and 28 chip samples from five trenches; 16 rock samples; seven till samples; and 240 soil samples over a 6,000-meter area at and around Lost Ace.

One of the 2018 trenches encountered 4.4 meters averaging 20.8 grams per metric ton gold, including a one-meter section with 88.2 g/t gold.

Aben said RAB drilling will provide a cost-effective means to quickly evaluate the high-grade near surface gold mineralization at Lost Ace, interpreted to be orogenic-style quartz-gold veins that bear a strong resemblance to and share a similar geologic setting with Golden Predator Mining's adjacent 3 Aces property.

"The orogenic style mineralization discovered at Lost Ace shares many characteristics with the orogenic veins discovered at the 3 Aces project," said Mike Burke, former chief geologist for Golden Predator. "Exploration at 3 Aces has shown the regionally extensive stratigraphic contact in the middle Yusezyu Formation contains consistently highly anomalous gold values. The discovery of gold mineralization in the upper Yusezyu Formation at Lost Ace suggests newly discovered orogenic gold mineralization could occur over a significant stratigraphic extent between the upper and middle Yusezyu Formation on the Justin property."

Geologic evidence and observations at Lost Ace indicate that the mineralizing event that emplaced high-grade gold at Lost Ace may be present at POW, a lower grade intrusive gold zone about 2,000 meters east of Lost Ace.

"(T)he previously discovered intrusive related gold mineralization at the POW zone would have intruded through the prospective stratigraphy which hosts the older orogenic mineralization in the district potentially enhancing grades in the intrusion related gold system," Burke explains.

Concurrent with the RAB drilling at Lost Ace, Aben will conduct core drilling at the POW, where drilling in 2011 and 2012 encountered up to 60 meters of 1.19 g/t gold and 46.4 meters of 1.49 g/t gold.

Aben will further evaluate POW as a potential host to bulk-tonnage gold target and to test for the continuity of higher-grade skarn mineralization along strike.

In addition to drilling, geologists will investigate several other exploration targets on the Justin property that have seen limited work but have yielded encouraging results will receive field evaluation and surface sampling.

The program is expected to be completed by the end of June, which will coincide with the start of the 2019 program at Forrest Kerr in British Columbia, which is expected to include at least 5,000 meters of drilling.

Drill activities will begin at the Boundary Zone in late June, where over 12,000 meters of drilling has been completed over the previous two seasons.

FK17-04, drilled at North Boundary in 2017, cut 10 meters of 6.7 g/t gold, 6.4 g/t silver and 0.9 percent copper in hole.

The next hole, FK17-05, cut 122 meters averaging 1.2 g/t gold, 1.8 g/t silver and 0.21 copper, including a six-meter high-grade core averaging 21.5 g/t gold, 28.5 g/t silver and 3.1 percent copper;

FK18-10, drilled last year, cut four high-grade zones:

• 13 meters of 3.9 g/t gold, 4 g/t silver and 0.62 percent copper from 61 meters;

• four meters of 22 g/t gold, 22.4 g/t silver and 0.17 percent copper from 84 meters;

• 10 meters of 38.7 g/t gold, 2.9 g/t silver, 0.09 percent copper from 114 meters; and

• six meter of 8.2 g/t gold, 1.4 g/t gold and 0.11 percent copper from 183 meters.

This year's drilling will initially focus on the potential for a northward extension of the high-grade North Boundary core encountered in these holes.

A one-meter interval of 331 g/t gold encountered at 118 meters in FK18-10 is about 230 meters north of a 326 g/t gold interval reported by Noranda in 1991.

Aben plans to test for a connection between the high grades encountered in F18-10 and in the Noranda drill hole.

The 2019 drilling at Forrest Kerr will also target polymetallic mineralization at the South Boundary zone, where broad intercepts of gold-silver-copper-zinc values in quartz veins were discovered last year.

Aben Resources Ltd.

An airborne magnetic survey will be conducted in late May over a 2,000- by 4,000-meter area that covers both Boundary zones. The geophysical data will help delineate important geologic structures that influence mineralization and allow the technical team to focus on areas with greater discovery potential.

In addition to the 2019 program at Boundary, Aben anticipates that a high priority target identified at Forrest, a zone about 13 kilometers (eight miles) south of Boundary, will also be drilled this summer.

The area of interest at Forrest is defined by highly anomalous gold-in-soil and gold-in-rock values coincident with a strong geophysical conductive anomaly originally reported in 2013.

–SHANE LASLEY