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

Sitka Gold Corp. August 17 announced that it has finished the second phase of its summer diamond drilling at its district-scale RC Gold project in Yukon, Canada.

Finishing ahead of schedule, Sitka completed 20 holes for approximately 6,500 meters of drilling during the first two phases of the 2022 program at the 376-square-kilometer (145 square miles) land package in the heart of Yukon's Tombstone Gold Belt.

"With the addition of a third drill this summer, Sitka has completed this portion of the diamond drilling program ahead of schedule," said Sitka Gold CEO Cor Coe. "The focus of this second phase of drilling was to expand and better understand the mineralization at the Blackjack zone while also potentially providing the necessary spatial density to generate an initial resource estimate."

Last December, Sitka reported that the Blackjack discovery hole, DDRCCC-2021-021, cut 220.1 meters averaging 1.17 grams per metric ton gold from a depth of six meters.

The phase one 2022 drilling at RC focused on expanding the wide zone of Blackjack gold mineralization discovered in hole 21.

Highlights from the 2022 winter drilling at Blackjack include:

• 62 meters averaging 1.21 g/t gold from a depth of 253 meters in hole DDRCCC-22-022.

• 205.8 meters averaging 1.01 g/t gold from surface in hole DDRCCC-22-023.

• 107.5 meters averaging 1.44 g/t gold from a depth of 4.5 meters in hole DDRCCC-22-024.

• 349 meters averaging 0.71 g/t gold from a depth of 19 meters in hole DDRCCC-22-025.

Continuing to focus primarily on stepping out laterally and vertically from the famed discovery hole 21, Sitka reports that all of the holes of its summer 2022 drill program have intersected mineralization, with visible gold identified in the majority drilled.

"Drilling continued to encounter significant intersections of mineralization at the Blackjack zone in numerous step out holes that included several instances of visible gold hosted in both intrusive and metasedimentary host rocks," Coe continued. "Assay results from our summer drill program are expected to greatly expand our understanding of the controls of mineralization at the Blackjack zone."

Considered the largest consolidated land package strategically positioned mid-way between Victoria Gold's Eagle Gold mine and Sabre Gold's Brewery Creek gold mine, the RC project comprises five underlying properties – RC, Bee Bop, Mahtin, Clear Creek, and Barney Ridge.

Recently, Sitka identified a large 500-meter by 2,000-meter intrusion-related gold system on RC spanning the Blackjack, Saddle, and Eiger zones, which has been the main focus of the company's drill programs at RC for the last three years.

In addition to expanding Blackjack, the phase two 2022 drilling carried out this summer included the first ever diamond drill hole completed at the Bos Stock, a Tombstone-age intrusion-related gold target located approximately 24 kilometers (15 miles) southeast of Blackjack.

"Our systematic approach to exploration at RC Gold continues to deliver excellent results and we are eagerly awaiting the assays from this phase of drilling," finished Coe.

These assays, along with structural information obtained from oriented drilling, data from detailed core logging, reprocessed lidar data and interpretation of an airborne magnetic geophysical survey, will form the basis for planning a third phase of 2022 drilling at RC.