Drilling operations at Newrange Gold’s Pamlico Project in western Nevada. Source: Newrange Gold Corp.
Newrange Gold Corp. [NRG-TSXV] Chairman Bob Carrington said Monday the company hopes to announce a resource estimate this year for its flagship Pamlico gold project in Nevada.
Carrington spoke to Resource World Magazine while attending the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference in Toronto.
Newrange was focused on gold exploration in Colombia until the opportunity came up in 2016 to acquire a property in one of Nevada’s historic gold districts, not far from the infamous Comstock Lode.
Carrington grasped the opportunity because he believed Pamlico offered his company the chance to explore and develop a district scale, near surface, potentially high-grade gold deposit in multiple target areas.
Under a July, 2016, agreement Newrange obtained the option to purchase a 100% interest in the Pamlico property. At that time, only 103 shallow holes had been drilled in the entire property.
Exploration to date has been insufficient to define a mineral resource that would meet National Instrument 43-101 standards of disclosure. But Carrington believes that could change this year if Newrange can complete enough drilling to produce a gold resource estimate.
“Market conditions will determine the fate of the program,’’ said Carrington, who attended the PDAC conference with Newrange CEO Bob Archer.
Their optimism is based on Pamlico’s location and previous history. Drilling by previous operators and owners intersected very high-grade mineralization. One drill hole intersected 4.6 metres, grading 239.7 grams per tonne gold, and included 0.8 metres assaying 702.5 grams per tonne in an area called the Merritt Zone.
But due to the fact that the property has previously been in private hands since 1898, it remains underexplored in terms of modern exploration techniques, with no property wide geology, geochemistry or geophysics.
At this stage, the company said five large, high potential exploration target areas exist at Pamlico and include the E-W, Gold Box, East Zone North and East Zone South, in addition to the 2.7-kilometre Pamlico Ridge. In total, these areas have a combined strike length of more than 14.2 kilometres.
Newrange has said its work for 2019 will continue to focus on defining a multi-million ounce, near surface, oxide gold resource (this estimate is conceptual in nature at this stage), with additional target definition, expanded underground mapping and sampling, reverse circulation and core drilling.
Having recently determined that gold mineralization at the site is oxidized and therefore amenable to low cost heap leach methods, the company is currently aiming to construct a three-dimensional model of the site’s underground workings.
It is hoped that this will assist exploration crews in coming up with the resource estimate and prevent the company from drilling into those workings from surface.
On Monday, Newrange shares eased 14.7% or $0.025 to 14.5 cents. The shares are trading in a 52-week range of 7 cents and 29.5 cents.