ASX-listed, Canada-focused gold explorer, Ardiden, has fired up the rotors for a detailed airborne geophysical survey of its Pickle Lake gold project in north-western Ontario with a focus on the exciting brownfields New Patricia prospect.
The Perth-based company’s recently commenced helicopter survey marks 45 years since the Ontario Geological Survey unit carried out regional first-pass aerial work over the historic mining area.
The old OGS survey was conducted over a wide-spaced 200m line spacing and 120m elevation, whereas the current survey being undertaken by contract geophysics specialist, TerraQuest, on behalf of Ardiden, is far more penetrating with 50m line spacings at a flight height of between just 25m and 35m.
According to Ardiden, the New Patricia prospect sits along strike from its fully owned Dorothy-Dobie deposits and Barrick Gold’s historic high-grade Golden Patricia underground gold mine.
The ultra-detailed survey is planned to fly over a big Archaean greenstone belt and will take in some 35km of strike length over what Ardiden calls favourable, underexplored structures.
It will assist in delineating targets for future drilling and will extend across more than 3000 line-kilometres over the entire New Patricia claim.
Golden Patricia produced 619,796 ounces of gold from only 1.216 million tonnes of ore grading an impressive 15.21 grams per tonne between 1988 and 1997. There remains an estimated combined historical non-JORC resource of 99,600oz of gold from 5.7 g/t dirt at Dorothy-Dobie.
Ardiden says the gold mineralisation trend that runs through the New Patricia property is a south-easterly extension of the same structure that also hosts the Dorothy-Dobie deposits and the old Golden Patricia underground mine.
The survey will also cover both the brownfields Esker Gold prospect near Golden Patricia and a bunch of untested greenfields geological structures heading towards the company’s flagship Kasagiminnis gold deposit 20km to the east of New Patricia.
Kasagiminnis, also part of the Pickle Lake project package, has an inferred resource of 110,000 ounces of gold from 790,000 tonnes of ore going a decent 4.3 g/t and Ardiden is still beavering away on a diamond drilling rig hoping to build on that resource base.
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