Independence Gold advances 19 properties in B.C., Yukon

With $15 million in the till, newly listed Independence Gold (IGO-V) is looking to recreate past success in British Columbia and the Yukon searching for gold and silver. The company was spun out of Randy Turner’s former Silver Quest Resources on Dec. 29 2011, following New Gold‘s (NGD-T, NGD-X) $131-million, $1.32-a-share takeover bid in October.

New Gold acquired Silver Quest for its 25% interest in the Davidson property, which forms the northern half of the 8.3-million-oz.-gold-equivalent Blackwater gold-silver project. (New Gold bought the rest from Richfield Ventures earlier in the year.) It also picked up Silver Quest’s large Capoose property 25 km to the west.

Turner’s Independence Gold will now look to further explore its remaining 3Ts epithermal gold-silver project in central B.C. as well as 18 other properties in the Yukon’s White Gold district. A geologist and long-time diamond enthusiast, Turner is best known in the industry for having sold Winspear Diamonds and its Snap Lake diamond project in the Northwest Territories to De Beers for $305 million in 2000. De Beers officially opened the $1.1-billion underground mine in July 2008.

Independence Gold’s 3Ts project covers a quartz-carbonate vein system about 120 km southwest of Vanderhoof in B.C.’s Nechako Plateau region. So far 12 individual mineralized veins have been identified, ranging up to 650 metres in strike length and up to 15 metres in true width.

A 10-hole, 1,645-metre diamond drilling program at 3Ts in the summer returned one sparkling intersection grading 5.33 grams gold per tonne and 50.6 grams silver per tonne over an estimated true width of 14 metres in hole TT-11-47. The hole was drilled in the Ted vein area, intercepting the lower Ted vein at a depth of 301 metres below surface. Of the two other holes testing the vein, hole 46 returned 1.3 metres of 0.37 grams gold and 32 grams silver and hole 48 (testing the northern extension of the vein) returned no significant assays. Six shallow holes at the Ringer target similarly failed to find significant mineralization, while a single hole testing the Mint vein intersected 3.7 metres averaging 7.69 grams gold and 84.2 grams silver.

A historical inferred resource estimate for the project’s Tommy and Ted veins contained 826,300 tonnes grading 5.22 grams gold and 85 grams silver, representing 138,800 oz. gold and 2.25 million oz. silver.

Farther north, Independence conducted early stage exploration work on all 18 of its Yukon properties this year. The majority of exploration was focused on the Boulevard and Prospector Mountain projects, with reconnaissance-style exploration on the other properties.

Boulevard, located in a historic placer gold district about 135 km south of Dawson City, adjoins the western border of Kaminak Gold‘s (kam-v) Coffee gold project in the White Gold district. After taking 5,000 soil samples early in the field season, as well as geological mapping, airborne magnetic and radiometric surveys, Independence completed several thousand metres of drilling along a 20-km-long geochemical anomaly. Results are pending.

Prospector Mountain is a gold-copper porphyry prospect believed to host peripheral epithermal high-grade gold-silver-copper veins on the western side of the property. Located some 90 km northwest of Carmacks, Yukon, access to the property is via 4×4 vehicles or helicopter. Independence collected approximately 800 rock samples from the property in June as well as completing the usual geophysical surveys and mapping. A follow-up 1,588-metre, 12-hole drill program was completed in August, the results of which are also pending.

A total of 3,750 geochemical soil samples were taken from the company’s other properties in the district.

Shares of Independence Gold debuted at 50¢ on Dec. 29 before sliding to 40¢ by presstime on Jan. 3. The company has 43.2 million shares outstanding, with New Gold holding a 9.9% interest as a result of an earlier $3-million private placement.