Ardiden drilling for Canadian gold through winter freeze

ASX-listed Canada gold explorer, Ardiden has the drill rods spinning again in northwest Ontario, chasing the untested easterly strike of its Kasagiminnis gold deposit as it looks to build on the existing 110,000 ounces at 4.3 grams per tonne gold already inferred. 

Ardiden’s latest suite of drill holes at Kasagiminnis are vectoring in on an untested section of around 1.5 kilometres in strike length. The company has also installed a winter access track to improve the connection from the main highway to the drill site.

The Kasagiminnis deposit – which the company refers to as Kas - was an exploration target partially hidden under a lake and barely touched by historical exploration drilling. However, recent magnetic imagery conducted by Ardiden using drones lit up the eastern extension of the deposit presenting a compelling target for a winter drill program.

Ardiden is chasing the same iron formation geology which hosts the gold mineralisation at Kas and is looking to vector in on an exploration target Ardiden says could conceptually hold as much as 4.0-5.8 million tonnes at 3.9-6.6 g/t for a potential contained gold resource ranging anywhere from 0.5M ounces to 1.2M ounces.

The Canadian gold explorer is also ramping up activity at the Eastern Hub of its Pickle Lake gold project where a second rig is working the South Limb gold prospect, chasing strike extensions to Newmont’s Dona Lake gold mine which sits less than 1km up the haul road.

Ardiden said Newmont’s Dona Lake boasted 1.8Mt at 6.6 g/t for almost a quarter of a million ounces of contained gold.  Gold production at Dona Lake ended back in 1993 when gold prices were below US$400 per ounce.  The company is now chasing two additional iron formations which run directly south from the hanging wall and footwall lodes of the historical Dona Lake mine.

Not content with having two rigs chasing down more gold mineralisation in Pickle Lake’s Eastern hub, Ardiden has locked in a Mines Department permit to drill test the under-explored Esker gold prospect in Pickle Lake’s western hub. 

Esker lies to the east of the historical Golden Patricia gold mine operated by Barrick through much of the 1990s and dug out over 600,000 ounces of gold. Ardiden is hoping to have boots on the ground at Esker as soon as First Nation approval is received.

The company claims Esker sits on a regional scale geological structure which hosts the Dorothy and Dobie prospects at its western end.  Ardiden’s Esker prospect and Barrick’s Golden Patricia mine sit at the western end of the structure, some 5-10km away from Dorothy and Dobie. 

Importantly, the historical Pickle Crow gold mine sits at the western end of Ardiden’s prospective trend where mining operations across four decades between 1935 and 1966 extracted over 1.4M ounces of gold from underground levels as deep as 1,158 metres.

Ardiden noted some of the best historical hits on its ground along the Dorothy-Dobie-Esker trend included 0.5m at an incredible 472.8 g/t gold below 184m downhole and 0.44m at 153.5 g/t gold from 111.4m.

The trend also threw up some solid, shallower hits including 20.65m at 3.6 g/t gold from 96.85m downhole and another of 8.63m going 5.5 g/t gold from a very reachable 55.82m.

Ardiden Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Robin Longley said: “We have three areas lined-up for the drill bit this year at our Pickle Lake Gold Project. First, we are now drilling an untested 1.5km-long eastern extension of the Kas Deposit; second, we have two more iron formation units to drill test at South Limb that run straight into the Dona Lake mine; and finally, we are well advanced with permitting to get us out into our Western Hub ground holding, which includes the Esker Prospect, a Tier-1 scale geophysical anomaly screaming out to be drilled.”

“Once established at Esker, we will have a 35km strike length of highly prospective ground to explore which surrounds Barrick’s Golden Patricia Mine and includes our Dorothy-Dobie, Tonsil and Cooper gold target Prospects. This is what we set out to do, drill at multiple Gold Prospects to give much better odds of making new discoveries.”

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