A Vancouver gold hunter is expanding its footprint around a historic Matheson-area mine that produced some of the richest ore ever mined in Ontario.
HighGold Mining acquired three properties surrounding its Munro-Croesus Gold Project, just east of Matheson, to increase the size of its project area by more than 40 per cent with a single contiguous property covering 28 square kilometres.
The project is 75 kilometres from Timmins, adjacent to Highway 101, in the middle of the mineral-rich Abitibi Greenstone Belt.
HighGold Mining is a spinoff company of Constantine Metal Resources. The company listed on the TSX-V in September 2019.
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Last April, the company posted a first-time resource at Munro-Croesus Gold Project of 750,000 ounces grading at 10.9 grams per tonne of indicated gold, and 134,000 ounces in the inferred category at 7.2 grams per tonne.
The project's star attraction is the former Croesus Mine, a small but rich operation, first discovered in 1914, that produced exceptionally high-grade samples. The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto has five Croesus samples that collectively weigh 85 pounds and contain 480.7 ounces of gold (387,727 grams per tonne). The property is also pocketed with numerous pits, trenches and exploration shafts from early in the last century.
Croesus had mostly been in private hands since gold was discovered on the property and has never been explored using modern techniques.
Over the decades, land ownership there had been fragmented dating back to the early to mid-1900s when Croesus was in production. Over the last 12 months, the company has made seven separate property acquisitions to piece together a parcel of mostly patented mining claims.
HighGold ran a 3,500-metre drill program between September and November before starting a detailed airborne electromagnetic survey of the project area. Drilling resumes in February.
The company is also out to raise $3 million in flowthrough shares to accelerate exploration at its Munro-Croesus project. The offering closes on Dec.23.
"Consolidation of Munro-Croesus has created a single large property package in a highly prospective region of the greater Timmins gold camp; this strategic land position has received almost no contemporary exploration due to the historically fractured land ownership," said company president-CEO Darwin Green in a Dec. 14 statement.
"This represents a rare opportunity in a mature and productive gold jurisdiction and we are excited to initiate the first modern, systematic exploration of the greater project area. Central to our exploration thesis is a high conviction that the exceptional tenor of gold grades produced from the Croesus mine near the turn of the last century does not occur in isolation and is indicative of a highly fertile gold environment."
HighGold has two other exploration properties to the west in the Timmins camp. Golden Mile is northeast of the city, near Newmont's Hoyle Pond Mine and Golden Perimeter, southwest of the city, which is available for option. The company's flagship asset is its high-grade Johnson Tract Gold Project located in Alaska.
