The search is on for high-grade gold in the Dryden area by a new exploration player in the northwest.
Dryden Gold, a privately-held company, plans to enter the market this fall with an initial public offering to raise money to drill a substantial land package, 30 kilometres east of the city near Dinorwic.
The Dryden-based junior miner holds a property package of almost 40,000 hectares on a promising greenstone belt with the potential to harbour high-grade gold.
“We have the same kind of rocks you see in the Red Lake camp two hours away,” said company president Maura Kolb in a recent interview with Crux Investor.
Dubbed the Manitou and Tremblay projects, Kolb knows the ground well having most recently worked as the vice-president exploration at Treasury Metals, which is developing the nearby Goliath project into a mine. Dryden Gold announced last month that Kolb had come aboard, joining CEO Trey Wasser in the front office.
Wasser expects an initial public offering sometime in September. Their largest private shareholders include Alamos Gold, Earthlabs and junior mining financier Eric Sprott.
Wasser felt confident they could raise $3 million to $4 million in the next couple of months to put together their first drill program.
Dryden Gold acquired the package last year through an option deal with a prospector and Manitou Gold. The previous owners bought it from Goldcorp in 2008 and spent five years consolidating the ground.
Their series of properties runs on a linear trend from the southwest to the northeast. The claims are situated to the south and to the east of Treasury’s Goliath project.
The area has been explored in the past, drilled, bulk sampled and even mined but Kolb wants to explore the whole package in a ”systematic way.”
Not lost on the company was a drill result from a 2011 program by a previous operator that yielded a stunning 3,497 grams of gold over an 8.5-metre length of core.
The thrust of their exploration efforts will revolve around better understanding a 50-kilometre long sheer zone running the length of their property that is the key to figuring out the gold mineralization.
In decades past, two of the properties, labelled Kenwest and Canamerica, were part of the former Gold Rock mining camp. The history dates back to the first prospecting in 1895 that resulted in a series of small mining operations, including the Big Master Mine which operated briefly at the turn of the last century.
The company flew airborne geophysics across the property last year and is following that up with a summer geochemical program. Geologists were in the field last month to collect samples to begin ranking targets before the drill rigs are brought in.
With the Trans-Canada Highway close by, access to rail, power, gas and the City of Dryden less than 40 kilometres away, Wasser and the combination of the size of the land package and the nearby infrastructure make it “ripe” for a partnership with a major or mid-tier miner, provided they can show the results.
Wasser noted the Dryden gold camp “is starting to get some attention” with Treasury developing its mine to the west, Dynasty Gold hitting great results at its Thundercloud Property to the east, and Kinross Gold working a property to the northwest.