Golden Ridge makes discovery in Golden Triangle

Larry Nagy has covered a lot of ground since graduating with a degree in geological sciences from the University of Saskatchewan in 1966.

As a director of Delaware Resources he was responsible for Delaware’s acquisition and development of the Snip property, a gold project in B.C. that he identified for re-staking in his earlier career at Cominco. He also served as a director of Calpine Resources, the company that optioned the Eskay Creek gold property and subsequently found one of the largest and richest gold-silver deposits in North America.

While president and CEO of Oliver Gold, Nagy led the team that unearthed the Segala gold deposits in Mali and the Ipanema gold deposit in Zimbabwe. He was also president and CEO of Solomon Resources at the time that it found, together with Channel Resources, the Bomboré gold deposits in Burkina Faso.

Two years ago, Nagy’s private company, now listed as Golden Ridge Resources (TSXV: GLDN), optioned the Hank property — 140 km north of Stewart in B.C.’s Golden Triangle — from Barrick Gold (TSX: ABX; NYSE: ABX).

The gold major had inherited the property in the 1980s from Lac Minerals, and hadn’t drilled it since.

The Williams zone at Golden Ridge Resources’ Hank project. Credit: Golden Ridge Resources.

“Every time it came up for review everyone would say, ‘Yeah, we should take a look at it,’ but rather than spending any money on it, they paid about $80,000 a year in cash in lieu and held on to the ground,” Nagy says in an interview. “Barrick, like most big companies, has dozens of prospective properties in their files. They drill the best ones first, and the Hank property just didn’t make the list.”

But Nagy had his eye on Hank for quite a long time — and his instincts that there could be something significant only intensified as exploration in the Golden Triangle started to heat up.

“We’ve had a lot of success over the years and after you look at hundreds of these things in the field — and you walk on the ground and look at all the alteration and the geology, and what other people have done — you get a feel for the property, and I really liked Hank from the very beginning,” he says.

In early August, Golden Ridge reported a 327-metre intercept grading 0.31% copper, 0.35 gram gold per tonne and 1.94 grams silver per tonne in a porphyry copper-gold discovery at Hank’s Williams zone.

The hole — 18-007 — ended in mineralized monzonite at 604 metres’ depth.

“We’re on to a major discovery at Williams,” Nagy says. “The monzonite may now be the feeder and the main drill target on Hank … it’s early stage, and I don’t want to get too excited because things could go south, but I doubt it.”

Golden Ridge’s geologists say that the broad intervals of intense potassic alteration with bornite and digenite indicate a large, alkalic, copper-gold porphyry system at surface. Only the top of the system has been hit, showing widespread phyllic (also known as “quartz-sericite-pyrite”) alteration at surface, which often overlies porphyry copper-gold systems, and exists both above and lateral to the potassic-altered monzonite at Williams. The mineralized monzonite shows continuity along strike and at depth, and the copper mineralization extends into the surrounding volcanic rocks.

An initial magnetic survey last year suggested a circular zone 400 metres in diameter. The mineralization forms a broad tabular zone extending beyond at least the northern limit of the magnetic anomaly. The cause of the circular magnetic anomaly is unclear, but could come from magnetite alteration overlying a feeder stock at depth, the company says.

Golden Ridge has done two 3 km long induced-polarization (IP) lines, run on 250-metre centres, across the Williams zone. Preliminary results show a 0.8 km wide chargeability anomaly, coincident with the ground magnetic anomaly at surface in the Williams zone.

The chargeability anomaly plunges south, towards the property’s lower alteration zone (LAZ), and expands to over 1.6 km wide. Early interpretations suggest that the quartz-sericite-carbonate-pyrite alteration constituting LAZ could represent a large alteration halo overlying the southern extension of the Williams copper-gold porphyry. The target is open south, north and at depth, off the IP grid.

Chris Paul, Golden Ridge’s vice-president exploration, notes that Imperial Metals’ (TSX: III) Red Chris copper-gold mine, 75 km northeast, shares “remarkable” similarities in geology with the Hank property.

“If you read the history of Red Chris, it started as essentially something the size of what we’re seeing in the first couple of drill holes at Williams,” he says in a telephone interview from the project site. “There were two showings in the sixties and seventies — it wasn’t until the late 2000s that they decided to deep-drill that — and they found these two small zones coalesced at depth into one large, 4 km long porphyry … so just being so close to Red Chris and seeing the rock, alteration and mineralization looking so similar, it’s just really encouraging for the size potential of what the Williams could be over the coming years below the LAZ. The LAZ is 3 km, and we believe it’s essentially the halo around the porphyry.”

Lac Minerals acquired the property in 1983, drilled over 100 holes — mostly in the upper alteration zone — and in 1985 established a small, historic resource of 50,000 oz. gold at 4 grams gold per tonne within 80 metres of surface. From that small resource, Lac started exploration drilling on other parts of the alteration zone, and the LAZ. Each of the zones had a strike length of over 2 kilometres.

“There were a lot of targets to test. They had some successful holes, but were never able to increase the size of that resource past 50,000 oz.,” Mike Blady, a geologist and Golden Ridge’s president and CEO, says in an interview.

In 2016, the second year of the option agreement with Barrick, the work involved some geochemistry work, mapping, sampling and four IP lines on the property, mostly over the epithermal targets south of the new Williams zone discovery.

Last year Golden Ridge drilled Hank for the first time in over 25 years, using Lac Minerals’ old geologic model as its basis. Its first hole was drilled to confirm some of the old high-grade hits in the LAZ, and cut 4.3 metres of just under 25 grams gold-equivalent. Another hole — in a new zone in the LAZ called the Kaip zone — returned 21.6 metres of 7.04 grams gold-equivalent.

All the 2017 drilling culminated in the testing of Felsite Hill, which is located above the upper alteration zone and the Pits zone. The drilling at Felsite Hill was targeting a conceptual Bonanza-style feeder zone lying below the anomalous clay-silica-pyrite cap, and the down-dip extension of the mineralized zones. But as it turned out, the target wasn’t mineralized as Golden Ridge and previous operators had anticipated.

“This left us scratching our heads as to what was going on in the property — we didn’t have a geological model that was working for us,” Blady says. “We started looking at the data harder, and one of the things that kept poking up was a copper anomaly to the north of Hank Creek. We then started to focus our efforts north of the creek and completed soil samples that produced a nice copper-gold soil anomaly. We followed up with a ground mag survey focused over the geochemical anomaly and uncovered a round, circular, magnetic feature — about 400 metres in diameter — that was previously unknown.”

When Golden Ridge flew airborne magnetics a few years ago there was an anomaly over what is now the Williams zone, and the company’s geophysicist thought it was probably insignificant — as a single point, it could have been a data-point anomaly, Blady says. But once they did the geochemistry, the team went back mid-year and hand-stripped the overburden.

“We started digging, doing hand trenches and eventually started pulling out boulders that had copper stains and a little bit of potassic alteration, so we kept digging and digging, and eventually we reached bedrock, and it was this intense potassic-altered monzonite. And we thought, ‘holy crap, this is all the signs of an alkali porphyry — a copper-gold porphyry!” Paul recalls.

They took samples, sent them to the lab, and got hits of between 0.5% and 0.8% copper at surface, with a half-gram to over a gram gold.

By that point, however, it was October 2017, and too late in the season to drill. Blady and Paul spent the winter looking at the data, hypothesizing that the new porphyry zone was somehow related to what was going on with the epithermal system to the south. The first drill hole into the Williams zone in 2018 hit the 327th-metre of 0.31% copper, 0.35 gram gold per tonne and 1.94 grams silver per tonne.

“It kind of blew our minds a little bit,” Paul says. “I was half expecting maybe it’s only a few metres, as all we hand-stripped was a few metres, and you can’t see it — it’s all blind.”

The mining camp at the Burrage air strip. Credit: Golden Ridge Resources.

Paul notes that when Hank was last drilled in the 1980s, no one had figured out that the LAZ was the outer halo of a copper-gold porphyry.

“The LAZ was historically only mapped as being on the south side of the valley,” he says. “The historic workers had never actually crossed the creek to the north and explored the area of the Williams zone. What we found in our drilling on the Williams zone this year is that the LAZ actually continues across the creek to the north side of the valley and is connected to and overlying the Williams porphyry. The significance of this is that the entire 3 km length of the LAZ may be connected to underlying copper-gold porphyry mineralization.”

In the 1960s–1980s, he continues, they went after the low-hanging fruit — exposed rocks on mountain ridges — that were easy to find. “They didn’t bother looking in the bottoms of the valleys and in the tall trees, because the rocks were not exposed. It took a bit of luck. It just happened we had some soil samples over there.”

Two drill rigs are on the property completing a 6,000-metre program. One drill is targeting the Williams zone, north of the creek, and the other drill is following up on epithermal hits on the south side of the creek.

“We’re just getting started — this is the first hole of what could be hundreds here,” Paul says. “The deposit is still open in all directions.”

Golden Ridge can earn a 100% interest in the Hank property by spending $1.7 million on exploration by the end of 2018. Barrick keeps a 2% net smelter return royalty (NSR) and has a back-in provision. Under the provision, if Golden Ridge finds 3 million oz. gold, Barrick has the option to back-in to a joint venture. Should that scenario come to pass, Barrick would own 51% and Golden Ridge, 49%. The NSR would be extinguished and Barrick would reimburse Golden Ridge’s exploration expense.

“For a junior, you have to be either lucky or have a lot of money,” Nagy says. “In our case, we don’t have a lot of money, but were very lucky to have hit in the first hole.”

He also credits the geology professors at Simon Fraser University, who taught Blady and Paul their craft.

“They are really a credit to their profs,” he says. “They certainly have a good sense of what makes an orebody, and technically, they’re first class.”