Midland to drill for gold in Labrador Trough

Midland Exploration (TSXV: MD) will start drilling its wholly-owned Willbob gold project in Quebec in early September.

Willbob is in the Labrador Trough, 65 km west of the town of Kuujjuaq, Que., and contains 1,488 claims covering 683 square kilometres. While the area has seen heavy exploration for base metals from the 1950s to 1970s, little exploration has been done for gold before Montreal-based Midland arrived on the scene.

Midland’s prospecting over the past few years has identified prospective gold zones, including the Ants and Stars showings, which will see their extensions tested in the coming 1,000-metre campaign.

Ants is an outcropping zone of disseminated pyrrhotite with minor quartz veins in quartz diorite. A channel sample from July 2019 returned 1.46 grams gold per tonne over 11 meters, including 2.99 grams gold over 4 metres that helped extend the zone by 15 metres. Ants now measures 65-metres long by 5- to 24-metres wide, the company says.

At Stars, drilling will target a massive sulphide zones 50 metres below a 2017 drill hole, which returned 0.4 gram gold per tonne, 0.79% copper and 0.046% cobalt over 2 metres, and below another hole that pulled up 0.49 gram gold per tonne, 0.59% copper and 0.042% cobalt over 5 metres.

The prospecting in July also worked on a new block of 81 claims in the Canyon Lake area, near the Kan gold project owned by Osisko Mining (TSX: OSK). Selected grab samples, collected from a gold-bearing quartz vein hosted in an iron formation and aligned over a distance of 300 metres, yielded the following grams of gold on a per tonne basis: 18.55, 16.85, 10.2, 4.94, 1.01 and 0.97.

Midland will also do follow-up prospecting at Canyon Lake in September, targeting the new gold showings discovered during the July campaign.

Midland shares were trading at 94¢ at press time within a 52-week trading range of 66¢ and $1.46. The company has 65 million shares for a $61.5-million market capitalization.