Kula Gold (ASX: KGD) has found rock chips grading as high as 11.2 grams per tonne (g/t) gold at its 100 per cent owned Brunswick project in WA’s southwest near an area where historic grades of 130g/t and 32.7g/t gold were mined.
Recent field mapping also uncovered other impressive rock chips which assayed at 3.4g/t and 3.3g/t and there are still another eight samples to come back from the lab.
The Brunswick project area is no stranger to gold fever. It boasts the historical Camilleri and Blackwood Venture gold mines from which the precious yellow metal was mined by hand many years ago.
Camilleri mined an impressive gold grade of 130g/t resulting in 236.73 ounces of gold from 51.35 tonnes of ore. Blackwood Venture was a bit smaller and mined 20.75 tonnes of ore at 32.7 g/t to produce 24 ounces of gold.
Kula is now seeking to run the rule over those historic locations with modern-day equipment.
Kula Gold is particularly interested in the Camilleri Prospect in a historically rich area. This neglected area had previous miners plan drill holes which for unknown reasons did not eventuate. Hopefully for Kula Gold’s benefit this historical oversight will be fortuitous. In addition, the Jarvis Prospect nearby provides excellent gold potential due to identification of unrecorded historic shafts and high order soil anomalies.
Kula Gold managing director Ric Dawson
The latest mapping and sampling efforts by Kula are aimed at homing in on the Camilleri and Blackwood Venture orebodies to better understand their orientation and may lead to the maturation of drill targets down the track.
The regional geological picture seems to be on Kula’s side, with the Camilleri prospect sitting on trend with the historic Donnybrook Gold Mine which operated in the early 1900’s. Interestingly, one of the Donnybrook Gold Mine shafts, called the Queen of the South, produced 35kg of gold from 320 tonnes of hand-mined ore – at a crazy grade of 109 g/t.
As Kula prepares for the return of assays for the remaining rock chips from its latest exploration efforts, the company says it has submitted a programme of work to the regulator for advanced exploration in the coming quarters.
It also has boots on the ground at its Jarvis prospect, still within the Brunswick project, where it is completing mapping, rock chip and soil sampling to follow up on work done in the area during the 1980s.
Notably, Kula says that historic work focussed on an area with soil geochemical anomalies peaking at 500 parts per million (ppm) gold that was not fully evaluated at the time. The company says this was due to scout percussion drilling using inferior equipment resulting in poor sample quality with high contamination.
Modern drilling technology will have no such issues providing JORC-compliant data as the company looks to ground truth those soil hits.
The old-timers in some of WA’s historic gold mining areas almost always left gold behind given they were generally only interested in what would be considered these days to be crazy high grades. Their limited exploration techniques in some cases (like Spectrum Minerals) left millions of dollars of gold behind only a few hundred metres from existing discoveries. One thing seems certain however, they likely did not go out there in the middle of a hot summer pick and shovel in hand without a glittering payoff – the only question now is how much they left behind.
And it's probably not a bad time for explorers to have gold on their radars, with the spot price of the precious metal sitting at dizzying heights of $3500 per ounce.
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