Gold exploration company adds new fully-owned property in the Yukon to higher-priority list.

Sitka Gold Corp. April 23 announced that it has exercised its option to acquire full ownership of the Barney Ridge property next to the company's RC Gold project in Yukon, Canada.

The 376-square-kilometer (145 square miles) contiguous district-scale land package in the heart of Yukon's Tombstone Gold Belt, RC Gold, is one of the largest consolidated land packages in the Yukon.

This highly fertile and largely underexplored land package is about 100 kilometers (62 miles) east of Dawson City, at the headwaters of Clear Creek and Big Creek, a major placer mining district that is serviced by a network of gravel roads and trails.

Lying between Victoria Gold's Eagle Gold Mine and Sabre Gold Mine's Brewery Creek gold mine, the property comprises five underlying properties – RC, Bee Bop, Mahtin, Clear Creek, and Barney Ridge.

Sitka now reports that it has completed all the exploration requirements and made all the cash and share payments to acquire 100% of Barney Ridge from veteran prospector Bernie Kreft.

"The Barney Ridge Gold property is an excellent addition to our large RC Gold Project land package located in Yukon's Tombstone Gold Belt, a region that continues to gain prominence as an underexplored gold bearing district," said Sitka Gold CEO Cor Coe. "We are looking forward to following up on the recent gold exploration results at Barney Ridge as part of our exploration efforts at RC Gold this summer."

Under the initial option agreement with Kreft, Sitka was required to pay $150,000, issue 500,000 shares, and complete $850,000 in exploration over five years. An additional $200,000 was payable, and one million shares issuable upon public disclosure of an NI 43-101-compliant mineral resource estimate of at least 750,000 ounces of gold.

To fully sign off on this deal, the final stipulation is an amendment that waives the balance of future exploration expenditures and allows Sitka to make a final payment of $60,000 cash and issue 550,000 shares to fully exercise the option and gain full ownership of Barney Ridge.

"We are very pleased to have reached an agreement whereby Sitka will obtain 100% ownership of the Barney Ridge property," said Coe. "The Barney intrusive stock has a very large surface footprint and exhibits many of the same mineral characteristics as the nearby intrusions present at our expanding Blackjack and Eiger gold deposits."

Sitka Gold Corp.

Located about nine kilometers (5.6 miles) west of the Clear Creek Intrusive Complex that hosts the Blackjack and Eiger deposits on the RC Gold property, Barney Ridge is a 17.8-square-kilometer (6.8 square miles) contiguous claim group that contains the Barney Stock, a mid-Cretaceous intrusion that has a signature approximately 2,000 by 1,000 meters.

The intrusion-related gold mineralization identified to date at Barney Ridge has a similar composition to the intrusive bodies that comprise the proximal Clear Creek Intrusive Complex, where Sitka recently defined a mineral resource estimate of 1.34 million ounces of gold within and around the Saddle and Eiger intrusive stocks.

"The Barney Ridge property, which has never been drilled, was always a key component of the consolidated RC Gold project land package and we are eager to unlock value there with expanded exploration efforts as we continue to grow the initial mineral resource estimate and pursue additional new discoveries across our district-scale RC Gold project," said Coe.

With the acquisition of a substantial portion of its flagship RC Gold project fully under its belt, it is anticipated that the company will ramp up exploration efforts to determine the full extent of this prospective intrusion-related gold system.