An Australian gold explorer operating near Pickle Lake will have plenty of drill targets for an upcoming exploration program.
Perth-based Ardiden has identified numerous high-grade drill intercepts after reviewing almost two decades’ worth of old drill logs.
In a detailed 70-page news release, the junior miner said there are indications of high-grade gold over a horizontal surface of 25 kilometres on their two properties in northwestern Ontario.
One historical drill intercept yielded a gold value of 472.8 grams per tonne (g/t).
The company said there’s gold mineralization along strike across the Dorothy-Dobie and New Patricia Properties and especially at depth.
Ardiden recently acquired more ground in the former gold mining camp to more than double its land holdings to 257 square kilometres.
Through an earn-in agreement with Exiro Minerals, Ardiden’s latest acquisition, named the New Patricia Gold Prospect, connects to their Dorothy-Dobie Gold Prospect, which features the former Golden Patricia Gold Mine.
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No exploration work has been done on the New Patricia property since 1990.
To get a big picture of both properties, Ardiden set about reviewing all the drill data from 1971 to 2009. The data sets involved more than 38,000 metres of drilling and 480 drill holes.
“Our review of historical data provides clear evidence of significant extensions of high-grade gold mineralization on our ground along strike of the historical underground gold mine at Golden Patricia,” said company CEO Rob Longley in a Feb. 18 news release.
The Pickle Lake-area has four former underground gold mines that went down to more than 1.2 kilometres.
The company considers the Pickle Lake area to be vastly under-explored despite being situated within a greenstone belt that has yielded more than three million ounces of high-grade gold from those four mines.
Just as at Red Lake, 180 kilometres to the west, Ardiden said it is at depth where most of the gold will be found.
Ardiden said the drilled-off gold zones, carried out by earlier companies on their Dorothy-Dobie and New Patricia Properties, appear to be extensions of the Golden Patricia Shear Zone from which gold was mined at the 750-metre deep Golden Patricia Mine.
That mine produced 619,796 ounces of gold at a grade of 15.2 grams per tonne between 1987 and 1993.
“In addition to good width intercepts of high-grade gold, this data shows numerous spectacular grade intercepts along a 25-km strike,” added Longley.
“An intersection of 472.8 g/t gold over half a metre supports our exploration strategy to focus on high grade lode-style gold mineralization.
“Our aggregation of a compelling ground holding at the Pickle Lake Gold Project has a clear objective of defining the next world class gold deposit in Ontario.”
Ardiden has four gold deposits near Pickle Lake and is also exploring a lithium property, 60 kilometres from Armstrong.
