Gateway Mining starts new drilling phase beneath historical Caledonian open pit
Gateway will also carry out a major soil geochemistry program over 20km of strike at Montague – targeting mineralised structures north of current resources.
Gateway Mining (ASX: GML) has commenced a new phase of reverse circulation drilling at its flagship Montague gold project in Western Australia’s Murchison district.
It is believed to be the first systematic program testing the entire strike length of the mineralised Montague-Caledonian shear system below the historical Caledonian pit, which was mined in the late 1980s by Herald Resources.
Drilling will test areas beneath the pit where initial exploration last year returned primary-zone mineralisation results of 13m at 1.4 grams per tonne gold from 101m, including 2m at 6.4g/t gold; and 18m at 0.5g/t gold from 106m.
The company will also test the the Caledonian structure over a 450m strike length, at depths of 150m below surface.
Shear system deposits
The Montague-Caledonian shear system hosts the Montague-Boulder deposit, located over 1.3km to the north where Gateway previously delineated a 163,000 ounce indicated and inferred resource below the historic Montague-Boulder open pit.
The system also hosts the Evermore discovery (with an inferred 67,000oz) and historical open pits mined at the Caledonian and Caledonian NE prospects.
Secondary exploration
Gateway has said it will commence a secondary exploration program later this month to explore for significant new deposits within the broader 1,000 square kilometres of tenure at Montague.
The work will target “step-change” discoveries to accelerate growth of the project’s current 526,000oz mineral resource.
This will be achieved by continued exploration for shallow oxide deposits within 5km of existing resources, exploration of large-scale targets identified to date (including depth extensions of known mineralised structures) and identification of unexplored and highly-prospective targets within the broader tenure.
Geochemical sampling
Gateway will kick off the secondary exploration program with broad soil geochemical sampling covering 20km of strike along the highly-prospective Tokay shear zone to the north of the current resource.
This will be followed by a two-dimensional seismic survey in the June quarter to refine deep targets around the resource on the margin of the Montague Granodiorite.
The results of this survey will enable the targeting of deep diamond drilling which is expected to be co-funded by the state government’s exploration incentive scheme.