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

Heliostar Metals Ltd. Sept. 7 reported that this year's drilling has encountered two zones of strong gold mineralization at the Aquila target on its Unga project in Southwest Alaska.

A zone of outcropping epithermal quartz veins at the southwest end of the Shumagin trend, one of two corridors of gold and silver mineralization running across the breadth of Unga Island, Aquila is one of the four highest priority targets on the project.

Aquila was discovered by Battle Mountain Gold in the 1980s, but drilling at that time was limited by poor sample recoveries.

Heliostar, which revisited this underexplored target during the 2020 season, obtained better core recoveries with modern drilling techniques.

The company's first hole at Aquila, AQ20-01, cut two zones of gold mineralization. From a depth of 37.6 meters, this hole cut 3.6 meters averaging 4.46 grams per metric ton gold and at a depth of 46.6 meters, cut 17.4 meters averaging 2.24 g/t gold and 3.2 g/t silver.

The 2021 drilling at Aquila included 13 reverse circulation drill holes focused on expanding the Amethyst vein encountered in hole AQ20-01. The latest batch of assay results is from seven of these holes.

Highlights from this first batch of 2021 Aquila drill holes include:

• 7.62 meters averaging 2.45 g/t gold from a depth of 60.96 meters in AQRC21-01.

• 1.52 meters averaging 5.57 g/t gold from a depth of 73.15 meters in AQRC21-05.

• 3.05 meters averaging 6.51 g/t gold from a depth of 28.96 meters in AQRC21-09.

"The Aquila target is delivering with these results defining another center of mineralization at Unga," said Heliostar Metals Vice President of Exploration Sam Anderson. "The phase one 2021 program has now defined shallow gold footprints over large areas at both Apollo and now Aquila, and assays remain pending for these and other targets at the project."

The company says these results support Aquila being a priority target in the next drill program at Unga.

"The geological interpretation is that Aquilla is just the top of a mineralized zone, and our next step is to undertake diamond drilling to define the full extent of mineralization at depth and along strike," said Anderson.

The success of the 13 holes drilled at Aquila also supports the use of RC drilling for cost-effective reconnaissance exploration at Unga, with the company completing significantly more meters per dollar with the RC rig than it would have with diamond drilling.

"Unga is an extremely large, 250-square-kilometer (97 square miles), land package and this current drill program is designed to rapidly test the highest probability targets with RC drilling ahead of a systematic diamond drilling program with a goal of growing the project's existing resource to greater than 1 million ounces of gold," the Heliostar exploration VP added.

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Shane Lasley, Publisher

Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.

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