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General Market Commentary
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General Precious Metals
Aussie junior options project near Pogo
Resolution Minerals Ltd. (formerly Northern Cobalt Ltd.) Dec. 16 announced that it has formally entered into an option to joint venture Millrock Resources Inc.'s 64North gold project in Alaska.
Previously known as the Goodpaster project, 64North includes nine claim blocks – West Pogo, Shaw, Eagle, LMS-X, South Pogo, East Pogo, North Pogo, Last Chance and Divide – covering roughly 160,000 acres in the Goodpaster Mining District, a gold-rich area of Interior Alaska anchored by Northern Star Resources Ltd.'s Pogo Mine.
Under an agreement announced in October, Australia-based Resolution Minerals has the option to earn a 60 percent JV interest in this large gold project by investing US$20 million in exploration spending, plus making US$200,000 in cash payments and issuing 38 million Resolution shares to Millrock over four years.
Upon earning a 60 percent joint venture interest on the entire 64North project, Resolution will have the option to earn up to an 80 percent JV interest in one of the blocks by funding a feasibility study for the selected block and funding Millrock's portion of mine development, in the form of a loan.
Since entering the initial agreement, Resolution has paid Millrock US$500,000 in advanced payments to lock in exclusive rights to option 64North for 100 days as the Australia-based exploration company completed its due diligence.
Today's announcement marks the completion of the due diligence and Resolution's official entry into the option to JV 64North.
Over the past two months, Millrock and Resolution have been busy preparing for a winter drill program at West Pogo, currently expected to be the claim block that Resolution selects to earn an 80 percent interest in.
As the name implies, West Pogo lies on the western border of the Pogo Mine property. Earlier this year, Northern Star announced that it has traced the Goodpaster discovery zone to the border of West Pogo.
Highlights from Northern Star's drilling in the Goodpaster zone include: 2.1 meters of 44.5 grams per metric ton gold; 2.2 meters of 28.1 g/t gold; 0.6 meters of 100.1 g/t gold; and 0.3 meters of 170.2 g/t gold.
The stacked zones of high-grade gold mineralization in the Goodpaster zone appear to continue into the Aurora Creek area of the West Pogo property. Two lines of controlled-source audio-frequency magnetotellurics (CSAMT) geophysics, the same technique used to identify gold-bearing structures on the Pogo property, has detected a high conductivity geophysical response beneath the south side of Aurora Creek and along strike of Northern Star's Goodpaster discovery.
Millrock says this CSAMT conductor is coincident with a magnetic low – indicating gold-mineralizing fluids may have altered the rock – and is also associated with strong gold, arsenic and bismuth soil geochemical anomalies at surface.
Using the advanced payments made by Resolution, Millrock has pushed a four-mile road into the Aurora Creek valley, which is the first target area of a drill program slated to begin at West Pogo by early March. A well to provide water to the drills, which is critical for winter drilling in this part of Alaska, has also been established in the Aurora Creek valley.