Trek Metals intercepts high-grade gold in maiden drilling at Christmas Creek

Maiden drilling at Trek Metals’ (ASX: TKM) Christmas Creek gold and rare earths project in Western Australia has delivered a series of “exceptional” high-grade intercepts.

The company completed 8,437m of drilling between August and September at the Martin, Coogan, Zahn and Willis prospects.

The sites had previously been identified through integrating and analysing legacy exploration data, re-processing geophysical datasets and completing a targeted soil sampling campaign.

RC drilling

Reverse circulation (RC) drilling at Martin returned best assays of 10m at 12.66 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 59m including 1m at 32.6g/t and 3m at 29.8g/t and 10m at 7.34g/t gold from 94m including 2m at 31.1g/t and 1m at 7.85g/t.

The results reinforce the “outstanding prospectivity” of the area, where previous drilling by Newmont Exploration yielded assays of up to 7m at 4.9g/t gold from 24m including 1m at 29.6g/t.

The gold in Martin’s assays has confirmed the existence of two dominant mineralised trends that, coupled with a previously identified large gold-in-soil anomaly, suggest the prospect could contain a significant orogenic gold system.

Greenfields discovery

Trek chief executive officer Derek Marshall said maiden drilling had significantly upgraded Christmas Creek’s potential to deliver a greenfields gold discovery.

“These results, combined with historical exploration data from Newmont, suggest a structural regime where the main mineralised trend may not have been effectively tested, with considerable upside interpreted along strike and at depth.”

Trek plans to integrate the maiden data into structural models to assist with follow-up exploration that will comprise downhole televiewer surveys and petrographic analysis of mineralised samples and host rocks ahead of further drilling.

Christmas Creek acquisition

Trek acquired the Christmas Creek project in December 2023 from Newmont, who once partly owned the district-scale asset under a farm-in joint venture with Archer X but relinquished the site following a rebalancing of its portfolio.

As part of the acquisition, Trek inherited around $6 million worth of historic exploration work performed by Newmont as well as collated data and results.

Trek has since expanded the Christmas Creek tenure by securing additional tenements.