Terrain Minerals has it nose to the grindstone, with ongoing exploration at its Smokebush project continuing to expand the footprint of its gold targets in WA’s resurgent Murchison goldfield. Sampling north of the company’s Monza gold discovery has now extended the envelope of the mineralised system to almost a kilometre of strike, with recent exploration revealing additional old mine workings and returning assays of up to 4.78 grams per tonne gold.
The company’s underexplored Smokebush tenure sits on the Yalgoo greenstone belt, about 350km north of Perth, which hosts the nearby long-running Golden Grove copper-zinc mine, the Minjar gold mining complex and the Mt Mulgine tungsten-gold deposit, highlighting the prospectivity of the region.
Terrain is now carrying out a program of detailed mapping and sampling across the Smokebush tenure, which is already paying dividends with initial reports from its exploration team revealing that artisanal gold mining across the project is more widespread than initially thought and is throwing up a swag of new targets.
Exploration over the company’s primary target at Smokebush, the Monza prospect, has identified a deep-seated underlying gold structure which extends under soil cover but has been tapped into by past mining over more than 500m of strike. Previous drilling by Terrain has returned some intriguing results from the target, including 4m at 4.46 g/t gold from 51m and 7m at 2.72 g/t gold from 25m down-hole.
The company has recently completed a further 12 drill holes at Monza, designed to test the northern extensions to the mineralised system, with Terrain now awaiting results.
Whilst Monza may be Terrain’s priority at Smokebush, the company has also identified a plethora of secondary targets across the project area, including the new Paradise City discovery that was also tested as part of the recent drilling program.
Paradise City is about 5km south of Monza and is centred on an extensive nest of old mine workings. Evaluation of the mine area by Terrain shows the host structure at Paradise City extends along more than 3km of strike, with sampling through the old workings returning high-grade results, including rock chips kicking as high as 49.27 g/t gold.
Historical drilling at Paradise City has also turned up more than a few good numbers, including 3m at 2.17 g/t gold from 10m and 2m at 3.61 g/t gold from only 15m down-hole. However, with the samples from three new drill holes now in the lab the prospect may quickly move to the fore.
Terrain is stoking the fire at Smokebush. With work about to kick off again at Wild-Viper in WA’s Eastern Goldfields the company looks to have a full dance card and plenty of gold results coming in to keep the market engaged over the next few months.
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By Matt Birney
