Summary
The Tibbs project is located in the Goodpaster Mining District approximately 175 kilometres southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, and 35 kilometres east of the Pogo Mine. The project is accessible via helicopter and historic winter trails and hosts an unimproved airstrip in the Tibbs Creek drainage. The property is comprised of 169 State of Alaska mining claims covering 13,480 acres, with at least 17 known target areas and historic lode Au production in three locations. The addition of Carrie Creek, Native Owned Land belonging to Doyon, Limited, in August 2020 adds a further 15,800 acres to Tibbs.
Gold mineralization at the property is hosted in both intrusive and metamorphic rocks of the Yukon Tanana Terrane (YTT) and appears to be controlled by the district-scale Black Mountain Tectonic Zone, a northeast trending structural corridor. Gold occurs in both high-angle quartz-arsenopyrite lode veins similar to the North Zone veins at the Pogo Mine and sheeted to stockwork quartz-sulphide veins hosted within sericite-altered granodiorite. The Tibbs property offers high-grade gold mineralization at surface, in trenches, and in drill core, all in proximity to existing infrastructure and an active mill.
Tectonic’s exploration work in 2017 and 2018 consisted of power auger soil sampling, a property-wide DIGHEM geophysical survey, and CanDig heli-portable excavator trenching to test for bedrock mineralization and define high-grade drill targets for follow up.
In 2019, Tectonic completed a 2,184 metre Rotary Air Blast (RAB) drilling campaign at Tibbs, testing 9 priority targets including those generated during the previous exploration seasons. In 2020, Tectonic completed 3,202 metres (“m”) of RAB drilling in 27 holes at its Tibbs Gold Project (“Tibbs”) over a three-week period beginning in mid-July. Drilling was focused on stepping out from a 2019 RAB intercept of 6.03 grams per tonne gold (“g/t Au”) over 28.95m at the Michigan zone as well as testing similar northeast-trending structural corridors at the Lower Trench and Wolverine targets. Please see complete tables of drill results from all Tectonic 2019 and 2020 drill holes at Tibbs including maps, sections, and drill assay sheets here.
About the Carrie Creek Property
The Carrie Creek property is contiguous to the north and south of Tectonic’s Tibbs project and covers the heart of the Black Mountain Tectonic Zone, a regional-scale, northeast-trending structure which controls mineralization at the Tibbs Project to the north and Northern Star’s Brink prospect to the southwest. The property is comprised of two blocks of Doyon lands (Native Owned Land) covering 15,800 acres.
At Carrie Creek, Cretaceous-aged intrusives and gneissic and schistose country rocks are cut by multiple high-angle fault structures or shear zones which appear to control gold mineralization at the property. From west to east, the structures are the Gunsight, Missing Lynx, Black Mountain, and Raincoat Ridge Shear Zones. All four shear structures trend north-northeast. At least three styles of quartz veining with associated gold mineralization are observed: sheeted quartz veins and veinlets with associated pyrrhotite, scheelite, molybdenite, and bismuth minerals, thicker quartz-pyrite-arsenopyrite-bismuthenite veins, and stockwork quartz-pyrite-arsenopyrite-stibnite veins associated with strong sericite alteration of the wall rock. The three vein styles are analogous to the Brink and the Fort Knox gold deposits, and the Gray Lead prospect at Tibbs and North Zone veins at Pogo, and the Michigan Zone at Tibbs respectively.
The previous operator completed property-wide shovel soil and rock sampling, CSAMT geophysical surveys, and 3,000 meters of diamond drilling over 13 holes as part of a reconnaissance program during the “Pogo rush” of the late 1990’s. The limited drilling identified multiple zones for follow up but did not test many high-priority targets. The property has seen no additional exploration work over the past 20 years.
About the Mt. Harper Property
The Mt. Harper property is located 25km southeast of the Tibbs and Carrie Creek properties, adjacent to the Mt. Harper lineament, a regional-scale northeast trending structural domain. The property comprises approximately 49,800 acres of Doyon lands (Native Owned Land) and has only seen minimal historic exploration.
The Mt. Harper property is hosted by Cretaceous aged quartz monzonite and granodiorite which intruded into Paleozoic gneissic and schistose rocks. The Mt. Harper intrusive complex hosts numerous styles of mineralization including high-grade molybdenum-bearing quartz veins and tungsten-rich skarns. The 19km by 11km property also hosts porphyry molybdenum-copper targets as well as structurally controlled silver-lead-zinc mineralization. Though historic exploration in the early 1980’s and the late 1990’s focused on the skarn mineralization, prospecting to follow up on stream sediment anomalies located rock samples of quartz-sericite-pyrite altered granodiorite containing up to 0.770 g/t Au.
Six main target areas are known from historical work at the property: Larsen Ridge/Lucky 13, Airplane Ridge, Quartz Porphyry, Good South, Section 21, and Watterson Ridge. A limited diamond drilling program consisting of 4 holes for 490 meters was attempted in 1981 at Larsen Ridge/ Lucky 13. The program was exclusively focused on testing skarn mineralization and was cut short due to poor weather late in the season, failing to adequately test any target. No follow up work was completed at the property.
Subsequent mapping and prospecting conducted at the Lucky 13 and Section 21 prospects during summer 2020 at Mt. Harper confirmed the presence of at least three styles of mineralization: copper-tungsten-silver skarn, stockwork gold-molybdenum, and breccia-hosted gold-silver-bismuth. At the Lucky 13 prospect, a historical skarn target, this year’s prospecting returned values of trace to 2.45 g/t Au and 936 parts per million Mo within stockwork quartz veins hosted by quartz monzonite. At Section 21, Tectonic collected a rock grab sample of quartz vein breccia containing 1.26 g/t Au with associated Ag (>100 ppm), Bi (>2,000 ppm), and elevated lead (774 ppm), zinc (110 ppm) and antimony (83 ppm).