Gold Standard’s window into the Carlin Trend

VANCOUVER — Gold Standard Ventures’ (TSXV: GSV; NYSE-MKT: GSV) Railroad-Pinion project in Nevada is occasionally referred to as the last underexplored district in the southeast Carlin Trend.

Located 17 km south of Newmont Mining’s (NYSE: NEM) operating Emigrant gold mine, Pinion is part of a 119 sq. km chunk of land that Gold Standard has consolidated to encompass the junior’s North Bullion, Dark Star and Pinion gold deposits.

“To have a contiguous land package like ours in the Carlin Trend is rare, and usually only held by the majors,” Gold Standard’s president and CEO Jonathan Awde says in a phone interview with The Northern Miner. “We are the first company to ever look at Pinion and the entire district without being limited or bound by a line.”

With gold prices dropping to US$1,250 per oz. in 2014, Gold Standard shifted its focus from deep targets at North Bullion to the shallow resource potential of its newly acquired Pinion project in the south. The latter property came with its fair share of historical drilling, so the company went to work with data compilation and validation, along with a modest drill program, to achieve a maiden resource estimate.

“The goal was to put Pinion in the same category as Emigrant, Newmont’s most profitable gold mine in the state,” Awde says. 

And Gold Standard wasn’t too far off the mark. The company calculated an indicated resource last year at Pinion of 20.8 million tonnes of 0.63 gram gold per tonne (423,000 contained oz. gold) and an inferred resource of 55.9 million tonnes of 0.57 gram gold (1.02 million oz.).

The deposit, which remains open in all directions, occurs within the fourth and southernmost dome-shaped exposure of the Carlin Trend in the Pinon Range. It is structurally linked to the North Bullion property by a northerly trending corridor that separates Tertiary volcanics to the east from the prospective Paleozoic sediments in the west.

Sharing a similar stratigraphic setting as Emigrant, gold mineralization at Pinion occurs in an oxidized, collapse-style breccia along the contact between Mississippian siliciclastic rocks and the underlying Devonian Devils Gate Formation limestone. The ore horizons are redistributed as large structural horst blocks that are broadly folded into a southward plunging anticline. Mineralization is best developed within the nose of the fold and thickens towards high-angled faults, which act as conduits for gold. 

Gold Standard has remodelled new stratigraphic markers at Pinion to reflect the structural controls that reposition the ore.

“Using our new geological model, it makes our drill intercepts somewhat predictable, which is something no one ever had on this property,” Awde says. “We certainly feel there’s more to Pinion than what’s there now.”

Since the resource calculation, drilling has extended breccia-hosted mineralization 400 metres southeast via hole 14-25, which intercepted 40 metres of 0.49 gram gold. Hole 14-38, the farthest southern drill hole, returned 49 metres of 1.16 grams gold. To the north, hole 14-24 returned five at- or near-surface oxidized gold zones, including 19.8 metres of 0.44 gram gold and 12.2 metres of 0.34 gram gold. 

With more assays pending from earlier drilling, Gold Standard is gearing up for this year’s activities. Awde says final budgets will be released in March and that the company expects to spend at least $2 million at Pinion and Dark Star. 

Awde says Dark Star has a shallow, non-National Instrument 43-101 compliant resource of 150,000 oz. at 0.75 gram gold, and is open to the north.

“The mines that will get built in the next four years will be assets like Pinion, which have low capital expenditures supported by low-lying fruit,” Awde says. “And we happen to have an exploration team with a track record of making discoveries to get us there.”

Gold Standard recently closed a public offering of 19 million shares priced at 58¢ per share, for gross proceeds of $11 million. Shares last traded at 52¢ with a 52-week range of 40¢ to 83¢, for a $64-million market capitalization.