Atac hits gold in first step-out drilling of 2011

Vancouver – Atac Resources (ATC-V) looks to have met high expectations with the first 2011 step-out drill result on its Carlin-style properties in the Yukon.

Drilled 100 metres east of Conrad zone discovery hole 10-008, hole 11-010 cut 114.9 metres grading 3.15 grams gold per tonne from 176 metres downhole.

The news send Atac’s share price up 39¢ or 5.1% to $8.04 with 298,000 shares traded, having already climbed 44¢ the day before.

Also on the Conrad zone, the company hit 14.8 metres grading 1.64 grams gold from hole 11-011 that was drilled from the same pad as discovery hole 10-008, which returned 21.1 metres grading 8.03 grams last fall. Hole 11-011 was designed to intersect a steeper cut of the same mineralization as hole 10-008.

The results are only the start of many more to come for the company. Atac plans to spend $25 million this year exploring its 1,600-sq.-m, 185-km-long Rackla project with eight rigs drilling about 40,000 metres.

Of that, Atac plans to drill a full 35,000 metres on the Nadaleen Trend, on which the Conrad zone falls, with the rest to be drilled on the Rau trend and Tiger area 100 km west. Atac describes the Nadaleen Trend as a 25-km-long and 5-km-wide belt that is highly anomalous for many Carlin-type pathfinder elements including arsenic, thallium and mercury.

Along with the Conrad discovery made on the Nadaleen Trend last fall, Atac also hit Carlin-type discoveries at the Osiris, Eaton and Isis zones, with 65.2 metres grading 4.65 grams gold pulled from Osiris, 9.6 metres grading 3.36 grams gold from Eaton and 17 metres grading 0.92 gram gold from Isis.

The company is still drilling at Conrad to evaluate the prospective gold zone along the trace of the Nadaleen fault, which is inferred to run the length of the Nadaleen trend and represents one of the deep structural feeders localizing gold in the Osiris mineralizing system.

Meanwhile two diamond drills are spinning at the Osiris zone, while another is testing a new target 4 km west of the Conrad area where a spring water precipitate sample graded 15.5% arsenic.

In non-gold news, the company reported in June that it had discovered a silver-lead-zinc target at its Ocelot target under a previously undrilled surface gossan in the western part of its Rackla project, roughly 15 km west of the Rau Trend.

At Ocelot, hole 9 hit 41.7 metres grading 145.43 grams silver per tonne, 3.36% lead and 11.65% zinc, hole 10 cut 63.4 metres averaging 73.81 grams silver, 2.44% lead and 8.18% zinc, hole 7 returned 11.9 metres carrying 58.03 grams silver, 2.01% lead and 12.41% zinc, and hole 6 hit 6 metres averaging 23.86 grams silver, 0.08% lead and 8.83% zinc, with depths ranging from around 60 metres to 200 metres depth.