ATAC rises on the back of a single hole

All it took was one hole for ATAC Resources (ATC-V) to catch the markets attention.

The Vancouver-based company released assay results from the first diamond drill hole in a previously untested section of its Rau gold project in the Yukon and the results have the company believing that it might be on the cusp of discovering a whole new gold district.

The intercept that has fueled such optimism came in at 65.20 metres grading 4.65 grams gold including 31.13 metres grading 9.26 grams gold.

That was enough to send the company’s shares soaring, as they climbed 49% or $1.30 to $3.96 on 3.2 million shares traded in Toronto on Sept. 1.

The hole came from what the company calls the ‘Osiris Target’ which is on its Sten claim block. The Sten claims sit at the eastern end of the vast Rau project, which itself is located 55-km northeast of Keno City in central Yukon.

Rau covers some 1,400 sq km, and the Sten claims sit roughly 100 km east of the Tiger zone, which had been the focus of most of the company’s exploration efforts. Tiger returned some impressive results back in 2008 and 2009 with highlight intercepts of 43.89 metres grading 15.52 grams gold and 24.47 metres gradng 19.58 grams gold.

The new results from Sten, and its distance from Tiger, had ATAC’s chief executive Graham Downs saying that the project could overlay a new gold district, one that the company has been busy trying to define.

“We have completed a 1,400 sq. km detailed stream sediment sample survey, covering 160 km of strike length,” Downs said in a statement. “Initial results of that work are very encouraging and numerous targets for follow up work in 2011 have already been identified.”

ATAC says the Osiris Target area has many of the characteristics of Carlin-type gold deposits, including similar alteration assemblages and associations with the low temperature arsenic sulphides, realgar and orpiment.

The company should soon be getting an even clearer picture of both mineralization and the geology of the zone as it has finished drilling four of the six holes designed to test a 300 metre wide section across Osiris.

Also, the results for the last 98 metres of the reported hole are still pending.

Just as those assays begin to arrive the company will be getting set to test the Isis Horizon, which lies 100 metres above the Osiris Horizon. Prospecting there has returned grab samples ranging from 1.48 to 23.90 grams gold within a 150 by 900 metre gold-arsenic soil geochemical anomaly.

Exploration dollars will flow out of a well fortified kitty as ATAC completed a private placement in early August that raised $22 million for company coffers. The company issued 8.4 million commons shares and roughly 3 million flow through shares to generate the capital and said at the time that the proceeds would be used for continued exploration at Rau.