Roundup: Atac, Kaminak gear up for 2011

Vancouver – In a couple of packed sessions at the Mineral Exploration Roundup in late January, leading Yukon gold explorers Atac Resources (atc-v) and Kaminak Resources (kam-v) laid out their plans for stepped up exploration in 2011.

Atac president Rob Carne said that, after calling its new gold discoveries in the wholly owned 185-km Rackla gold belt of the central Yukon “Nevada-style” for many months, his company is now confident in calling them “Carlin-style,” in that the mineralization style is so similar to the famed carbonate-hosted Carlin gold trend in northern Nevada, which is second in gold endowment only to the great Wits basin in South Africa.

That means the presence of lots of colourful realgar and orpiment in the mineralized material, which is easy to see visually, and makes for significant arsenic anomalies in soils.

Atac started exploring the property in 2006, and initially focused its drills on the 15-km Rau trend. 

It got strong results from the 800-metre-long Tiger zone, which received 132 diamond drill holes totaling more than 25,000 metres.

But last July, hints of the trend’s huge potential were revealed with the discovery and initial drilling of strongly gold-mineralized anomalies including Osiris, Isis, Conrad and Eaton, situated some 100 km to the east of Tiger along what’s called the Nadaleen trend, which had no previous gold exploration.

Atac is now focused on getting back to exploring those two distinct trends, and has Yukon exploration veterans Archer Cathro and Associates returning as project managers.

“We anticipate it’s going to be a very busy summer for us,” said Carne. “It’s a significant deposit and a new deposit type for Western Canada.”

Kaminak president Rob Carpenter was equally upbeat about his company’s prospects at its Coffee gold project, situated 130 km south of Dawson in the Yukon’s White Gold district, which kicked off the new Yukon gold rush a few years ago with the discovery by Underworld Resources of the 1.5-million-oz. White Gold deposit. Underworld was bought by Kinross Gold (k-t, kgc-n) less than a year ago.

Kaminak has budgeted $15 million for exploration work at Coffee this year, homing in on at least eight significant gold discoveries. As Coffee is a more-advanced project than Atac’s, Kaminak is also relying more heavily on geophysical surveying and structural analysis on various subzones, such as at the new Connector zone, where the Latte and Supreme zones intersect at right angles.

“There must be a causal relationship between the great amounts of placer gold in the Yukon and these new hard-rock discoveries,” Carpenter commented.

Kaminak investors are anticipating the imminent completion by SRK of a technical report on Kaminak’s 2010 exploration effort.