Solitario Zinc discovers new gold zones at Golden Crest, South Dakota
Solitario Zinc Corp. [SLR-TSX; XPL-NYSE American] has discovered two new areas containing significant gold mineralization at surface on its Golden Crest project. Based on these results, and its ongoing exploration program, Solitario has expanded its mineral claim position from approximately 18,500 acres to 21,340 acres of mineral rights in western South Dakota.
These mineral claims comprise a strategic land holding along the western extension of the Homestake-Wharf mining complex that has produced well in excess of 50 million ounces of gold with another 20-30 million ounces in historical resources. The project area is in a safe jurisdiction with highly developed infrastructure, an unbroken 145-year record of continuous gold mining, a skilled mining workforce and a history of high-grade, underground mineable gold deposits.
Two of the four newly sampled areas returned significant gold values, while the other two had anomalous gold. This round of assay results includes the highest assay value obtained from the surface to date: 8.13 g/t gold in grab sample number 6055020. Two other samples from the Downpour target contained 5.90 g/t and 1.65 g/t gold. The average grade of all nine samples collected from the Downpour area was 1.86 g/t gold.
Chris Herald, President and CEO, stated: “When we began our exploration work earlier this year at the Golden Crest project, our thesis was that a large gold endowment could exist at depth in limestone covered terrain west of the Super Giant Homestake-Wharf gold complex. Our work to date fully supports this hypothesis. Collecting multi-gram gold samples in the shadow of a +70-million-ounce gold district, with virtually no evidence of any past exploration, is truly remarkable. Solitario intends to move forward with more advanced exploration efforts, including a drill program for 2022, pending completion of permitting. We firmly believe that the Golden Crest project could emerge into one of the most important greenfield exploration projects in North America.”
Initial sampling has now been conducted over 13 prospect areas of the Golden Crest project. Five of the prospect areas have rock samples containing multi-gram gold, another three prospects have samples containing between 0.1 to 1.0 g/t gold and the other five sampled areas contained rock samples with detectable gold between 10 and 100 ppb.
Two gold trends have been identified to date: the Whirlwind, Matchstick and Treasure Fault prospects (WMT) define a 6.5-km north-south arcuate trend with significant gold values; and the Downpour-Log Jam trend, about 4 km east of the WMT trend, is still being defined, but appears to have significant expansion potential.