Getchell Gold to release Fondaway Canyon resource estimate in November – Richard Mills

2022.10.22

The drill hits keep on coming at Getchell Gold’s (CSE:GTCH, OTCQB:GGLDF) flagship Fondaway Canyon Project in Nevada.

So far in 2022, 10 holes have been completed in the Central Area of the property, totaling 3,900m. Assay results have been released for three holes, with assays remaining for holes FCG22-20 to 27.

Drilling continues to expand the North Fork Zone, which remains open in most directions. Assay results from holes FCG22-16, 17, 18 and 19 will be incorporated into a new resource estimate, expected this fall.

The revised estimate should significantly improve upon the 2017 resource estimate, which showed 409,000 oz indicated gold resources grading 6.18 g/t Au and 660,000 oz inferred grading 6.4 g/t Au, for a combined 1.1 million oz.

Below is a condensed summary of the recently announced drill highlights at North Fork:

• FCG21-16: 6.3 g/t Au over 50.7mincluding 10.4 g/t Au over 25.0m;
• FCG22-17: 3.8 g/t Au over 85.9mincluding 17.7 g/t Au over 9.9m;
• FCG22-18: 2.5 g/t Au over 43.4m, 2.1 g/t Au over 46.9m, and 1.9 g/t Au over 72.6m;
• FCG22-19: 1.8 g/t Au over 107.5m including 2.9 g/t Au over 32.9m.

Getchell Gold has carried out three drill programs, in 2020, 2021 and 2022. The aim is to significantly upgrade the 2017 resource estimate into a new resource, that will combine the drill results from all three of Getchell’s drill programs, along with the historic drill data, including the results from previous operator Canagold’s 2017 drill campaign.

Two consecutive years of field work have resulted in significant discoveries, expanded gold zones and consistently successful drill results. Mineralization within the Central Area’s delineated envelope has been considerably expanded; to date, it ranges 600 meters E-W along strike, 800m down-dip to the SW, and is approximately 100m thick.

Within this envelope, substantial high-grade shear vein structures with significant depth extents contribute to the potential. The drilling has yet to test the full extent of the gold mineralization, which remains open in most directions.

Originally, Getchell set a July 31, 2022 deadline for the cut-off data to be incorporated into its first Fondaway Canyon resource estimate, which would have the RE by the end of September or early October. However, as drilling progressed on the North Fork Zone, following up on drill hole FCG21-16’s high-grade gold drill intercept discovered at the end of 2021, it became imperative to wait, to incorporate the results from the first three 2022 drill holes (FCG22-17, 18 and 19) into the RE due to the potentially significant contribution they represent. 

This moved the data cut-off to Sept. 27, setting the highly anticipated completion of the mineral resource estimate, being done by Apex GeoScience Ltd., to mid-November.

Click here to view a 9-minute video by Getchell Gold’s President Mike Sieb, who provides a detailed summary of the key highlights and results to date from the company’s 2020 to 2022 drill programs at Fondaway Canyon. A transcript of the video appears below, courtesy of AOTH:  

Greetings,

I am Mike Sieb, President of Getchell Gold Corp. This video presentation will be focusing on the advanced exploration stage Fondaway Canyon Gold Project in Nevada. I will provide an exploration recap from the acquisition of the project in 2020, through multiple drill campaigns and discoveries, to a snapshot of where we stand today in preparation of the much-anticipated resource estimate to be released this fall.

The Fondaway Canyon Gold Project is located in Nevada, a jurisdiction that consistently is recognized as the number one mining jurisdiction in the world, boasting= a high concentration of gold mines that produce over 5 million ounces of gold annually, and rival some of the major gold-producing countries of the world. An excellent jurisdiction in which there is a comforting level of confidence to advance your venture.

Fondaway Canyon is well situated, with a number of prominent mines and deposits to the north and Reno, a short drive to the west. Getchell Gold Corp’s field office is centrally located in Fallon, and provides excellent base from which to manage the ongoing operations.

The project has witnessed a high degree of advancement and success, from the acquisition in early 2020. From Getchell’s technical teams and simulation, and reinterpretation of a very healthy historical data set, a new geological model was generated, and a drill program was initiated to test the model. A short six-hole drill program produced three new discoveries and set the stage for the larger and more ambitious drill campaign through 2022. As at the date of release of this video, the drill program remains ongoing, and we look forward to the generation of Getchell’s initial mineral resources estimate. We expect that the exploration program will continue to advance the project through 2023, and encapsulate all the results into a preliminary economic assessment by the end of next year. It’s going to be quite an achievement.

The first substantive exploration and mining work began at Fondaway in the mid-1950s with the discovery of tungsten, a short distance up the canyon. This discovery quickly translated into two producing mining operations, the Lower and the Upper Quick-Tun mines, that continued operating through to 1976. An additional benefit from this activity was the discovery of gold, a little further up the canyon in the mid-1970s, which launched over 40 years of exploration & mining, through to the present day, with Getchell being a decidedly fortunate beneficiary of the previous foundational work.

Moving eastward from the canyon mouth to the Central Area, one can see the myriad of workings reflective of past drill programs and small-scale open pit mining. Dimming out the surface layer, the drill traces and gold mineralization become visible, and the local patchwork of drilling becomes apparent.

A sizeable historic resource estimate was published by a previous operator in 2017, but as you can see by the small footprint of the historic resource, and the lack of drilling across much of the area, considerable upside potential is evident.

That is exactly what we thought back in early 2020, and the remodeling of the historic data set generated very promising target areas, starting with the NE-SW Colorado Pit to Packrat section, and showing the pre-2020 drilling the concentration of drilling around the Colorado Pit, and the scarcity of drilling elsewhere is apparent.

Previous operators assigned an over-reliant to the steeply dipping aspect of the mineralization, and focused their modeling and drilling in alignment with that interpretation. Upon reinterpreting the data, compelling indications arose, that the mineralizing controls may also express a predominant shallowly-dipping component. This revised geo-mineralization model significantly opened up the extensional potential for the mineralization, and projected that extension along surface lines, for a more favorable depth to mineralization ratio.

Getchell’s 2020 drill plan included four holes to test a 200-meter-long stretch within the target area on the section. Our technical team’s assumption was wholly validated, with all four drill holes intersecting substantial intervals of gold mineralization within the target window, and the Colorado SW Zone was discovered.

Following this phenomenal success, seven holes were drilled in 2021, filling in the area along the section, testing the down-dip extension to the southwest, as well as stepping out to the northwest. The results did not disappoint, with a couple of the holes reporting the longest down-hole intervals of gold mineralization in the history of the project, and the down-dip continuation of the mineralization still going strong.

So far in 2022, two additional holes have been drilled to strengthen the near-surface mineralization model, with assays pending.

Moving 300m southeast, the Halfmoon-North Fork drill section is highlighted. As with the previous section, the revised geo-mineralization model imposed a shallowly-dipping target area in a region with a paucity of drilling. One hole was drilled in 2020 through the heart of the target area, to once again test our technical team’s assumptions. Drill hole FGC-20-04 first passed through the steeply-dipping Halfmoon shear vein, supporting the grades and thicknesses reported in the historical resources estimate, before revealing substantive gold mineralization over the bottom 150m of the drill hole, marking the discovery of the North Fork gold zone, the second major discovery of the drill season.

The 2021 drill program followed up with three additional holes bracketing the North Fork discovery drill intercept. The gold intervals encountered were striking, markedly improving on the initial drill results. Of significant note, drill hole FGC-21-16, the last hole of the 2021 drill program, intersected exceptionally high gold mineralization of 10.4 g/t gold over 25m, within a broader zone grading 6.3 g/t gold over 50.7m. This interval exceeded the results of any hole drilled in the greater than 40-year history of gold exploration and mining at Fondaway Canyon. The high concentration is a clear testament to the intensity of the gold-mineralizing system, and further raises the upside potential of the project.

The start of the 2022 drill program was composed of three holes: FGC-22-17, 18 and 19, designed to bracket hole 16’s high-grade gold interval.

The results of these three holes have been received, and each of them has been impressive in their own right. Hole 17 returned one of the must cumulative gold intervals recorded in the project, grading 3.8 g/t gold over 85.9m and is situated close to surface a mere 66m down hole. Hole 18 intersected three intervals grading at or better than 2 g/t gold ranging from 43 to 72m down hole lengths. The lower gold interval, outside of the target area, is 75m distant from the nearest drill hole and may represent a new discovery. To date, three new holes have been drilled on this section: FCG-22-22, 23 and 25, designed to bracket and delineate hole 18’s lower gold intervals. Assays are pending for these holes.

There is no doubt that from inception in early 2020, Getchell Gold Corp. has significantly added to the gold mineralization and has significantly added to the upside potential of the Fondaway Canyon Gold Project. The drilling remains open along strike and down dip, and drilling remains ongoing through to the end of the year. The release of hole FGC-22-19 marks the cut-off point for incorporation of drill results into the forthcoming resource estimate, and as you’ve seen, the results from the three holes, FCG-22-17, 18 and 19 this year, should be quite additive.

The forthcoming mineral resources estimate will be the next major release from the company and will mark a major milestone in the ongoing advancement of the Fondaway Canyon Gold Project.

Thanks, from Getchell Gold Corp, trading on the CSE under the symbol GTCH and GGLDF on the OTCQB. As always, we are the one to watch.

Conclusion

Getchell Gold carried out three drill programs, in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Their aim was to significantly upgrade the 2017 resource estimate into a new resource, that will combine the drill results from all three drill programs.

Getchell’s field work has resulted in significant discoveries, expanded gold zones and delivered consistently successful drill results. Mineralization within the Central Area’s delineated envelope has been considerably expanded; to date, it ranges 600 meters E-W along strike, 800m down-dip to the SW, and is approximately 100m thick.

Within this envelope, substantial high-grade shear vein structures with significant depth extents contribute to the potential. The drilling has yet to test the full extent of the gold mineralization, which remains open in most directions.

A compelling aspect of Fondaway Canyon is the open-pit/ high grade potential, as demonstrated by the 2021 drill results, and the results so far in 2022.

Our reasons, at AOTH, for believing a new resource estimate will improve substantially on the previous (2017) one, are as follows:

• Getchell has discovered three new zones within the Central Area which included Colorado SW; a really high-grade zone close to surface called the Juniper Zone; and the North Fork Zone.

• Getchell’s 16 drill holes from 2020 and ‘21 all hit mineralization. New zones and higher-grade mineralization have been found, and a bigger drill program was executed this year.

• The 2017 resource didn’t include some very significant assay results from at least seven holes drilled by a former operator, so Getchell is missing some significant drill hole intercepts. 

• The cut-off grade used to come up with the 1.1Moz resource was 3.4 grams per tonne. Lowering the cut-off grade would, in my opinion, add a lot of ounces.

• Most of the +700 holes drilled at Fondaway were quite shallow; a previous operator was looking for heap-leach gold oxide deposits. But there are a lot of deeper holes that have mineralization shot through them, that are in the 0.5 to 3.0 g/t range. None of those intercepts made the 3.4 g/t cut-off, so they were excluded from the 2017 resource.

• Highlights of intercepts that never would have been included in the previous resource, include: hole 3 had 2 grams per tonne over 49m, hole 5 had 1.8 grams over a 90m intercept, that included 3 grams over 45m. In hole 8 Getchell reported 2.8 grams over 24.5m, another intercept lower in the hole had 1.4 grams over 30m. These intercepts are not only really decent grades, they’re over monster-sized widths.

• If we start to look at Fondaway Canyon from a bulk-tonnage perspective, all of the sub 3 g/t intercepts, and there are literally thousands of them, are going to play a role in delivering ounces into a new, much bigger global resource.

I’m expecting news flow from Getchell to continue well into 2023, as assays roll in from holes FCG22-20 to 25, and from drilling at the Pediment Area. Results are also expected from a maiden drill program at nearby Star, a copper-gold-silver project where multiple priority drill targets have been identified.

Getchell Gold Corp.
CSE:GTCH, OTCQB:GGLDF
Cdn$0.39, 2022.10.21
Shares Outstanding 105m
Market cap Cdn$41.4m
GTCH website

Richard (Rick) Mills
aheadoftheherd.com
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