Dryden Gold hasn’t released a gold estimate on its exploration property, east of the City of Dryden, but the company thinks it can deliver a high-grade project that will attract a major mining company.
In a Sept. 7 webinar, the local junior miner was certainly not lacking in confidence in touting its gold property, near the village of Dinorwic, as a future high-grade camp that looks on par with Red Lake in terms of its geology.
Sitting near the junction of the Trans-Canada Highway and Highway 72 to Sioux Lookout, company CEO Trey Wasser calls their project area “vastly underexplored.”
He believes their 400-square-kilometre property has “tremendous upside” that will eventually have a major or mid-mining company come calling, evoking Kinross’ acquisition of Great Bear Resources in the Red Lake district last year.
Only in business since early 2022, Dryden Gold is a privately held company with plans afoot to do an initial public offering in October to raise between $3 million and $6 million.
The company is chasing and mapping high-grade gold veins on a property that’s seen little exploration in the past and where they’ve been seeing high-grade drill hits near the surface.
But Dryden Gold won’t be the ones doing any mine development.
“Calling this Great Bear 2.0 is not, I don’t think, anything crazy.” said Wasser.
Great Bear never published a mineral resource estimate for its Dixie Project, but established such a high-grade gold base that it was enough to sway Kinross Gold to scoop it up in $1.8-billion deal in 2022.
“Using that (Great Bear) model is where we’re headed and we think we can put together a multi-million-ounce deposit along here, possibly,” said Wasser.
Since startup, Dryden Gold spent 18 months assembling a 400-square-kilometre land package, 30 kilometres east of Dryden.
Their claims follow a southwest to northeast gold-bearing trend called the Manitou-Dinorwic Deformation Zone. The company believes understanding this big geological structure is the key to discovering high-grade gold mineralization in the area.
Over the decades, there was very little exploration drilling and all of it very shallow.
With no geological model to go by, the company has put together a vein model using historic drill data to understand the area and get the big picture, said company president Maura Kolb.
Why this area has been underexplored is because the claims have been so fragmented and in different ownership hands for many years. What little historic mining that took place was only down to a depth of 80 metres but produced gold grades greater than 5.5 grams per tonne.
On tap for November is a 3,000-metre drilling program to expand the places where gold exists and to test various spots to get a better understanding of the geological structure at depth and along strike.
Kolb said they’ll put forward a project that’s high grade, mineable and where they can generate a pipeline of targets that will entice a company like Barrick, Kinross or Alamos to come forward.
“We’re really trying to create something that a big company would want to buy,” said Kolb.
“It has all the right ingredients, it just hasn’t had a chance to be done.”
To Kolb, the geology looks very similar to the Red Lake gold camp, the prolific 30-million-ounce camp, about an hour-and-half drive to the northwest.
Other companies in Dryden Gold’s immediate neighbourhood see the potential too.
Just to the north, Treasury Metals has a 3-million ounce resource with plans for a open pit gold mine.
To the southeast, Dynasty Gold is finding high-grade mineralization in the drill core at its Thundercloud Project and Kinross Gold has a property along Highway 502.
There’s also very promising lithium potential in the area.
