New Found Gold discovers high-grade zone at Queensway in Newfoundland

New Found Gold (TSXV: NFG; NYSE-AM: NFGC) says it has discovered a new zone and vein extending mineralization south of the Keats deposit at its Queensway project in central Newfoundland.  

Drilling along the Appleton fault at the project, 15 km west of Gander, N.L., discovered the new Trans Canada Highway zone and the Rocket vein at the Knob target. The drill program also returned more intercepts from Keats Main South. It all increased the length of a high-grade gold corridor to 4.1 km, the company said in a news release on Wednesday.  

“It is a lot of ground to cover but from a first pass of drilling, results indicate that the system’s strength continues,” Melissa Render, vice-president for exploration, said in the release. “We will persist with aggressive follow-up drilling which involves tracing the structures that are known to host high-grade gold.”  

The 1,650-sq.-km. project covers more than 100 km of strike on two primary fault zones: Appleton and Joe Bates Pond. 

Trans Canada Highway is in the footwall to the Appleton fault zone and has been intersected over a strike of 190 metres to a depth of 300 metres, New Found said. 

Assays from the Trans Canada Highway zone included intercepts of 79.6 grams gold per tonne over 2 metres from 427.1 metres down hole NFGC-22-863; 10.5 grams gold over 2.45 metres from 303.5 metres in hole NFGC-22-642; and 1.02 grams gold over 10.7 metres from 183 metres down hole in NFGC-22-703.  

The Vancouver-based company found the new Rocket vein 100 metres east of the Knob zone, a historical discovery with little modern-day probing. Drill hole NFGC-22-704 cut 12.63 grams gold over 4.45 metres from 65 metres depth. Knob’s mineralization is in an east-west structure of greywacke over a strike length of 160 metres, the company said.  

Intercept highlights from Keats Main South include 25.31 grams gold over 2.45 metres from 364 metres depth in hole NFGC-22-774; 72.7 grams gold over 2.2 metres from 379.8 metres in the same hole; and 4.59 grams gold over 14.9 metres from 115 metres in NFGC-22-845.  

“The high-grade gold associated with the Keats-Baseline fault zone, the structure that hosts the Keats Main zone, has now been traced over a strike length of 1.1 km and down to a vertical depth of 400 metres,” New Found said.  

Assays from the 421 zone, a southwest-dipping structure at an angle to the Keats Main zone, include 10.5 grams gold over 2.3 metres from 22.3 metres down hole NFGC-22-733. The company says this structure seems to concentrate high-grade gold where it interacts with the Keats-Baseline Fault. 

The Queensway project is among others held by explorers around Gander such as Labrador Gold (TSXV: LAB; US-OTC: NKOSF), Exploits Discovery (TSXV: NFLD) and Marathon Gold (TSX: MOZ). Marathon’s nearly $500 –million Valentine open-pit mine and mill are under construction about 200 km west of Gander. It’s the region’s most advanced project.  

New Found is conducting a 500,000-metre drill program at Queensway with about 51,000 metres of core pending results. It’s exploring both sides of the Appleton fault after results in November showed new life on the west side. Drill hole NFGC-22-960 at the Keats West area intersected 42.6 grams gold over 32 metres from 145 metres. On the east side, the first Queensway hole in 2019 returned 19 metres grading 92.9 grams gold from 96 metres downhole at Keats.  

It may take a year to prepare economic studies on how to develop the project, perhaps in an open-pit operation, chief executive officer Collin Kettell said in November.