Kairos Minerals begins drilling at Roe Hills, 20,000m program at Mt York to follow

After months of progress at its flagship Pilbara gold project, Kairos Minerals (ASX: KAI) has now moved to get a rig spinning at its Roe Hills gold-cobalt-nickel project east of Kalgoorlie.

Meanwhile, the exploration team in the Pilbara has been setting up camp at the priority Mt York project with drilling there to follow hard on the heels of Roe Hills.

Kairos’ 100%-owned Roe Hill lies 120km east of Kalgoorlie where recent exploration work has confirmed the potential for significant discoveries of high-grade gold, cobalt and nickel mineralisation.

Project adjacent to 1.37Moz deposit

The company’s tenure shares a boundary with the emerging Lake Roe gold discovery, owned by Breaker Resources (ASX: BRB).

Today Breaker announced it has increased the gold resource at Lake Roe by 40% to 1.37Moz of contained metal.

Kairos’ contractor Ausdrill has begun a 3,000m reverse circulation drilling program at Roe Hills, which is exploring for both gold and nickel.

A soil sampling program is also underway to assist in generating additional drill targets.

Kairos executive chairman Terry Topping says it is “great to have a drill rig spinning once again at Roe Hills”.

The initial drill focus is at the “highly prospective” Caliburn gold target, located near the French Kiss gold deposit owned by Silver Lake Resources (ASX: SLR).

“Our drilling will revisit broad anomalous intercepts within a significant shallow gold zone that remains open in all directions,” he said. 

Start of an active 2021 exploration program

In the Pilbara, work is in progress again at Mt York with a soil sampling program now being carried out.

“This is the start of an active period for Kairos with the 2021 exploration field season now stepping up a gear,” Mr Topping noted.

The program at Roe Hills is the first drilling at the project for a number of years.

After Caliburn, the rig will drill at Talc Lake to follow up previous nickel intercepts and to test a new interpreted ultramafic unit.

Testing new gold-in-soil anomaly

Then the rig will be moved to the Black Cat prospect to test a recently generated gold-in-soil anomaly.

Roe Hills is a second pillar of Kairos’s operations in Western Australia.

Of late, the focus has been on its 1,547sq km Pilbara project south of Port Hedland and increasingly on Mt York.

By contrast with other parts of the overall Pilbara project, Mt York is a brownfield target.

It was mined between 1994 and 1998 when there was an average gold price of US$350/oz. Some 125,493oz were extracted at an average grade of 1.85 grams per tonne.

It includes the site of the old Mt York mine and the Iron Stirrup prospect.