Nevada Exploration Acquires Additional 1,090 ha At Kelly Creek
VANCOUVER, BC - Nevada Exploration Inc. (NGE) has significantly increased its land holdings at its Kelly Creek Project based on the results of its 2017 Scorpion drill program. With the addition of 153 new claims covering 1,090 ha, NGE now controls 5,320 ha in the Kelly Creek Basin, making it the third-largest holder in this important covered search space at the north end of the Cortez (Battle Mountain-Eureka) Trend, after Newmont Mining and Barrick Gold.
Discussing the importance of the new claims, NGE’s CEO, Wade Hodges explains: “Based on our updated exploration model and our understanding of the large Carlin-type gold deposits to the north and south, we believe Kelly Creek offers district-scale potential, with multiple mineralized targets aligned along a corridor of favorable geology, under what we have demonstrated is only shallow cover. These types of opportunities have become rare, and we are excited to increase our holdings and our stakeholders’ exposure at the Project.”
NGE’s Kelly Creek Project is located within the prolific Kelly Creek Basin, a large covered valley basin bounded by multi-million-ounce Carlin-type gold deposits (CTGDs) at both the north and south ends. The Project was generated as a result of the Company’s systematic, hydrogeochemistry-supported, regional exploration program, which discovered highly-enriched gold in groundwater at the Project.
NGE has completed a comprehensive geophysics program at the Project, the results of which project important structures and host units, known to control the mineralization at Lone Tree and Marigold to the south, northwards beneath the covered Project. Based on these projections, the Company has completed Scorpion and other drill sampling programs to characterize the geochemistry of the groundwater, alluvial cover, and bedrock at the Project, which together suggest the presence of a large and mineralized hydrothermal system.
The combined exploration datasets have established that the critical components associated with large CTGDs are present at the Project, including: favorable structural setting, favorable host rocks, suitable wall-rock permeability, characteristic geochemistry, and significant volumes of altered and mineralized bedrock. With these datasets NGE has defined several mineralized targets similar in scale and ore-controlling features to the nearby Lone Tree and Marigold deposits. Lone Tree produced 4.60 Moz of gold from 1991 to 2015. Marigold produced 3.24 Moz of gold from 1989 to 2016, with a remaining indicated mineral resource of 4.98 Moz (348.30 Mt at 0.45 g/t) at December 31, 2016. Based on its geologic model, NGE believes that the gold-bearing hydrothermal system that was active at Kelly Creek was likely the extension of the system responsible for Lone Tree and Marigold, with potential to support significant additional mineralization.
NGE is an exploration company advancing a portfolio of new district-scale gold exploration projects along Nevada’s Cortez Trend. NGE is led by an experienced management team that has been involved in several significant discoveries in Nevada, including the discovery of Lone Tree and Rabbit Creek (part of the Twin Creeks Mine). NGE’s team has spent the last decade integrating the use of hydrogeochemistry with conventional exploration tools to develop a Nevada-specific regional-scale geochemistry exploration program. With innovative technology, NGE has completed the world’s largest groundwater sampling program for gold exploration, collecting approximately 6,000 samples to evaluate Nevada’s covered basins for new gold exploration targets. To advance follow-up targets, NGE has overcome the high drilling costs that have previously prohibited the wide-spread use of drilling as a prospecting tool by developing its Scorpion drill rig, a small-footprint, truck-mounted, small-diameter RC drill rig specifically tailored to the drilling conditions in Nevada’s basins (analogous to RAB drilling in other parts of the world).