US Gold Corp. to commence drilling programme at Keystone Project (Nevada) later in 2018

An Environmental Assessment (EA) study for the purpose of expanded exploration took place in early 2017 and is scheduled to be completed soon in preparation for the 2018 target assessment drilling programme. US Gold Corp. will therefore soon be able to start drilling in areas that have previously been inaccessible because of areal disturbance limitations. Up to this point, most Keystone project drilling was considered to be "scout drilling" largely conducted to obtain:

1.  Critical information related to host rock characteristics;
2. Locations of specific host horizons within the approximately 3000-ft-thick prospective host rock package comprised of Devonian Horse Canyon and Wenban and Devonian-Silurian Roberts Mountains Formations;
3. Gold deposit model characteristics; as well as to provide a sense of lateral extent of the hydrothermal gold system. Scout drilling results have indicated the size extent of the gold system and overall metal distribution is much larger than originally conceived.

Late 2016 through 2017, drilling was limited to access disturbance permitted through four individual Notices of Intent, or NOIs, each limited to 5 acres of disturbance. An additional NOI is also now in place to access the southwestern portion of the project, Potato Canyon area by name, that was staked in 2017.

According to the company, one or two scout holes are planned to be drilled soon in this area to provide an initial assessment of some encouraging altered areas with very anomalous geochemistry including gold in rock samples in the 1 - 5 g/t range. The 5-acre areal disturbance limitation under the NOIs disallowed access to many of the targets that subsequently evolved through ongoing target synthetisations obtained from merging of all the various data sets.  In spite of this limitation in prior drill access, considerable advancements in exploration understandings have resulted from the initial rather wide-spaced scout hole drilling programmes conducted to date.

Vice President of Exploration for US Gold Corp., Dave Mathewson, commented: "At this time, we are beginning the important target assessment and gold deposit discovery stage in the Keystone exploration programme. We are in the process of locating and qualifying site-specific, drill-hole target opportunities within the rather broad target encompassing areas that we have previously identified.”

“We are seeking the all-important high-grade gold zones that comprise potential economic deposits within this broad district-scale Carlin gold system. The economically important core portions of gold deposits tend to be rather small and tightly size-restricted targets, generally proximal to and within feeder structures. We realised early on that we were working on a large, robust Carlin-type gold system, but we did not have all the property area that we now have. In addition, there were very large voids in much of the historic data with which we began. We believe, however, that all drilling to date has provided encouraging results. The excellent host characteristics of Devonian Horse Canyon and Wenban, and the upper Devonian and Silurian Roberts Mountains Formations, are now well-established.” 

 “Our 2018 exploration drilling programme will commence with concerted, iterative site-specific drilling as soon as access conditions allow and the EA with a Plan of Operation, or POO, is in place." 

Read the article online at: https://www.globalminingreview.com/exploration-development/25042018/us-gold-corp-plans-2018-drilling-programme-at-keystone-project-nevada/