TerraX lines up new gold targets for 2016

VANCOUVER — There’s certainly no lack of high-grade gold targets for TerraX Minerals (TSXV: TXR) to shoot for at its Yellowknife City gold project, located in a district it refers to as “Canada’s last undeveloped high-grade gold camp,” 15 km from Yellowknife, N.W.T.

The company has spent the past year at its Northbelt property drilling the northeastern-trending shear zones Crestaurum and Barney, which are extensions of the major structures that host the 7.6 million oz. gold Giant and 5.5 million oz. gold Con deposits.

The 41-drill hole program aimed to build a resource estimate at the historically explored North, Central and South zones, which are shallow, high-grade ore shoots that pinch and swell over a 1.4 km strike length along the Crestaurum shear.

But Joseph Campbell, president, CEO and director of TerraX, says drilling intercepted a horizon of mineralization in a parallel-trending structure above the Central zone, and the results show the untapped potential for the underexplored, 94.9 sq. km property.

“We backed up the drill rig further east so that we could test the main shear zone at a greater depth, and we hit the zone right at the drill collars — it was just fortuitous,” he tells The Northern Miner during a phone interview, noting that the intercept graded 40.52 grams gold per tonne over 1.4 metres.

“We pulled the data on it to see whether it has any legs, and we’ve identified that this hanging wall structure has some pretty good continuity,” he adds.

The company traced the new structure in surface imagery data for 150 metres north from the Central zone to the North lode, where intercepts returned 2.9 metres at 6.01 grams gold and 2.5 metres at 4.72 grams gold.

Similar mineralization was hit above the South lode, 500 metres south of the Central zone, and although Campbell adds that it could be the same structure, more drilling is needed to complete the interpretation. Best intercepts include 0.5 metre at 15.65 grams gold and 0.7 metre at 18.25 grams gold.

TerraX is also faced with another puzzle at its Hebert-Brent prospect — an 80-metre wide zone of alteration and replacement-style mineralization at surface that trends in-line with the Barney shear.

Drilling returned intercepts of 10.4 metres at 3.61 grams gold and 6.7 metres at 2.7 grams gold.

“What we’ve been chasing is not any different than what you’d look for in the Val-d’Or or Timmins gold camps, which are the classic Archean, lode gold vein systems hosted within shear zones,” he says. “Hebert-Brent is quite a different target for us, it’s more along the lines of a replacement-style deposit, more akin to what you’d see in the Hemlo camp.”

After acquiring another 16.7 sq. km package of land south of the Con mine in September, Campbell says that TerraX now owns the “lion’s share” of the highly prospective Yellowknife greenstone belt — an arcuate-trending slab of Archean rock that was incised by shears and faults, crammed with gold.

The belt had been a hot spot for mining since 1945, but was abandoned in the late 1990s due to plummeting gold markets. Once the Con and Giant mines stopped producing in 2003 and 2004, Campbell says the greenstone belt fell into the “backwater of the industry,” and any exploration was brought to a standstill.

“There hasn’t been a lot of exploration really since the 1940s,” he says. “At Northbelt, there’s been work done up to the mid-1990s, but until we showed up, none of it had been touched for almost 20 years.”

The only historical, non-National Instrument 43-101 resource estimate on the property exists for the Central zone, which stands at 145,150 tonnes of 7.54 grams gold and drilled to 150 metres deep. 

Since it acquired the ground in 2013, TerraX has been infilling and stepping out on known mineralization across the shear zone, with drill results this year returning 4.2 metres at 12.29 grams gold, and 10.8 metres at 3.49 grams gold at the South lode.

“We didn’t have a great amount of success on the Central zone [this year], we’ve basically shown that the high-grade lode is pretty discrete, so we didn’t have much expansion,” he says. “But at the South shoot we’ve increased our strike extensions and dip length to 400 metres and 150 metres deep, and there’s more opportunity to expand on that.”

Although the company has diligently drilled the high-grade ore zones to prepare for a resource estimate, Campbell says that the company will consider its options in the new year.

“We’re a bit reluctant to nail down the resource, because there’s always the impression given by the industry that once you do your resource that’s all you got,” he says. “But all of these zones are wide open, and we’re still exploring them, so the decision to do a resource estimate will be based on whether we have a critical mass of resources.”

He says the company is fully funded to “branch out” and explore its lesser-known, unexplored targets, after completing a non-brokered private placement in June that totalled $5.2 million, which includes a $2.5-million placement with Osisko Gold Royalties (TSX: OR; US-OTC: OKSKF).

Campbell has his eyes on the Sam Otto and Mispickel gold showings at its adjoining Walsh Lake property — a 26.9 sq. km land package it acquired under a joint-venture agreement in 2013. Channel sampling at surface for the showings returned 5 metres of 1.9 grams gold, and 6 metres of 7.29 grams gold.

The company also plans to follow up on the Pinto and AES showings, which returned channel samples of 2 metres at 7.15 grams gold and 1 metre of 4.76 grams gold. Both prospects are located next to the Barney shear at its Northbelt property.

“AES is hosted within the most prominent structure on the property and is the continuation of zones that were mined by Giant, yet it’s never been drilled to any extent in the past,” he says. “It’s obviously a high probability target for us and now that we have the funding, we can finally put some holes into it.”

TerraX has traded within a 52-week range of 23¢ to 44¢, and closed at 25¢ per share at press time.

The company has 67.5 million shares outstanding for a $16.3-million market capitalization.