Assay Lab ‘Oops’: Northern Freegold Hits Bonanza-Grade

VANCOUVER — Northern Freegold (NFR-V, NFRGF-O) CEO Bill Harris and president Susan Craig suspected the assay results of a drill intercept from the Nucleus zone of its Freegold Mountain property in the Yukon was wrong when it came in at only 20.56 grams per tonne gold over 1.24 metres this summer.

During a meeting at Northern Freegold’s office in Vancouver in February, Craig held out a portion of the split core from the hole in question, 73. She and Harris pointed to the speckling of visible gold throughout the charcoal-coloured massive sulphides.

Harris’s grin intimated that there was no way the core could have assayed that low.

“So we sent it back to the lab for verification,” Harris said. To explain the discrepancy between lab result and visual assessment, Craig and Harris suggested that perhaps the free gold in the core had been difficult to assay correctly.

Their instincts were right — though it turns out the reason was a simple matter of a misplaced decimal.

A few days after the meeting at Freegold’s office, the lab informed them that rather than 1.2 metres grading 20.56 grams gold, it was in fact 1.2 metres grading 205.6 grams gold and found within a lengthier 47-metre intercept now grading 14.51 grams gold.

The intercept falls in line with numerous others showing bonanza gold grades that Freegold has hit throughout the summer of 2008 in a rapidly expanding high-grade zone at Nucleus.

One of the first to break 100 grams gold was hole 68, results of which were released June 9. It cut 3.3 metres grading 100.69 grams gold within a longer 38-metre intercept grading 10.41 grams gold starting 42 metres down-hole.

Others (including the blundered hole 73) soon followed. Hole 99 cut as much as 1.3 metres grading 410 grams gold within a longer 9.4- metre intercept of 70.19 grams gold starting at 110 metres depth.

Hole 114, one of the most recently assayed, returned nearly 1 metre grading 256 grams gold starting 23 metres down-hole. There are 12 drill-hole results pending at Nucleus.

These high-grade hits have substantially changed Craig and Harris’s drill program at the Nucleus zone and Freegold Mountain.

Harris says this past summer, Freegold had planned on drilling a “nice 50-metre grid” to expand the near-surface low-grade gold mineralization at Nucleus.

Freegold had delineated a 450- metre north-south-striking zone, about 300 metres wide and to a depth of 120 metres (and open in all directions).

That area had returned long intercepts such 72.4 metres grading 2.5 grams gold in hole 41 from the 2007 drill program.

But in 2008, as Craig recounts, when drillers radioed down to camp saying, “All we can smell is sulphides,” and the high-grade gold results began rolling in, Harris and Craig went back to the drawing board with their staff geologists.

What they realized is that in addition to the north-south low-grade gold porphyry, they were also hitting high-grade gold in an east-west structure, these pockets of “skarnrich, sulphide-rich” mineralization, Craig says.

The focus at Freegold is now squarely on this east-west-trending system and it comes at a fortuitous time.

With cash preservation more important than ever, this summer Freegold will forego a major drill program at the low-grade Nucleus area (where drilling last year garnered enough data for a forthcoming resource estimate) or at any of the other half-dozen or so prospective targets Freegold has on its Yukon property, 175 km northwest of Whitehorse.

Instead, with about $4 million in the bank, it will conserve metres drilled to around 5,000 this summer and spend about $3 million to test the extent of the high-grade Nucleus zone, which is open along strike and at depth.

Or as Harris puts it: “We’re gonna go out there and hit it like a sewing machine.”