Granite Creek targets big Yukon copper system
Granite Creek Copper Ltd. [GCX-TSXV; GCXXF-OTC; A2PFE0-FSE] said Thursday May 6 that it is poised to launch a 10,000-metre drill program at its Carmacks copper-gold-silver project in central Yukon.
It said the program will focus on upgrading inferred resources to indicated, as well as step out drilling aimed at delineating new resources where the deposit remains open to expansion.
Granite Crek shares advanced on the news, rising 2.5% or $0.005 to 20.5 cents. The shares are currently trading in a 52-week range of 25 cents and $0.045.
Carmacks is part of a large land package that Granite Creek picked up last year through the acquisition of share it didn’t already own in Copper North Mining Corp. The package, now controlled by Granite Creek, includes the advanced-stage Carmacks Copper Project and the highly perspective Stu Copper-Gold Project. The combined land package covers approximately 176 square kilometres within the Minto Copper District creating a copper-focused exploration and development company.
Granite Creek has said the acquisition of Copper North resulted in the combination of the preliminary economic assessment (PEA) stage Carmacks deposit, with 23.76 million tonnes (oxide and sulfide combined) grading 0.85% copper, 0.31 g/t gold, containing 446 million pounds of copper, 237,000 ounces of gold and 2.4 million ounces of silver (in the measured and indicated category, with the blue-sky potential of the adjacent Stu Project.
On Thursday, Granite Creek said Carmacks Zone 1 hosts a portion of the overall 23.76 million tonnes of the current mineral resource estimate and remains open at depth and along strike. It also said that while the oxide portion of Zone 1 has been well defined and is categorized in the measured and indicated category, only approximately half of the underlying sulfide resource is in the measured and indicated category, while the remainder is classified as inferred.
Starting at only 200 metres from surface, the sulfide in Zone 1 has the potential to add additional tonnage to the contained resources and could become part of an updated economic study.
Results from the 2020 and 2021 drill programs are expected to be included in an updated NI 43-101 compliant mineral resource estimate, the company said.
Granite Creek CEO Tim Johnson he sees the potential for a multi-billion-pound-scale copper system.