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The Valdez Creek project is located just north of the Denali Highway, reaching from lower Valdez Creek in the west, to Eldorado Creek in the east, in the north-eastern part of the Valdez Creek mining district. Easily accessed by road, Valdez Creek is a large, underexplored land package with significant lode gold potential. The Valdez Creek district has produced over 600,000 ounces of placer gold, primarily between 1984 and 1995, when Cambior operated what was then the largest placer mine in North America on lower Valdez Creek. Production was eventually halted due to economics, as the stripping ratio required to reach the placer gold was enormous. Valdez Creek Mining’s current placer operation continues to mine in White Creek, a tributary to Valdez Creek. The Valdez Creek Project encompasses the prospective highlands stretching from Timberline Ridge on the west to Gold and Lucky Hills on the east, believed to host the lode source of the placer gold in Valdez Creek. Lucky Gulch, a short, steep drainage in the heart of the project, produced some of the largest gold nuggets in Alaska’s history, including two that were 52 and 47 ounces respectively. Placer gold in the creeks is extremely coarse, frequently crystalline, and often contains quartz, indicating close proximity to its source.
Several lode gold occurrences were discovered in the district in the early 1900’s, but longstanding land ownership disputes prevented any significant modern exploration from taking place until fairly recently. CanAlaska made the first serious attempt to consolidate the district and conduct modern lode exploration on the Lucky Hill – Gold Hill area from 1989-1996. A small amount of shallow RC and core drilling was conducted between 1989 and 1990 on the TMC Zone, defining a 90,000 ounce gold resource, including intercepts as great as 22 meters of 16.29 ppm gold. An industry-wide shift away from North American exploration put an end to CanAlaska’s work, and no further drilling was undertaken on the TMC zone. Other gold occurrences such as Timberline Ridge, where hard-rock mining was conducted from 1933-1937, have never been drilled.
The Valdez Creek district is hosted by folded and thrusted metasedimentary rocks with several large and small intermediate intrusive bodies. Crustal-scale faults and subordinate shears cross the property, representing several periods of deformation. The district is highly prospective for both orogenic and intrusion-related gold deposits, and characteristics of both deposit types are noted at the various mineralized occurrences throughout the area. Most known gold occurrences contain both microscopic and coarse gold associated with sulfides in quartz veins. However, the presence of tellurides and coarse bismuth nuggets in some placer workings suggest that an intrusion-related source is also nearby.
Through persistent, concerted effort, World Class Mining consolidated the majority of the district under single ownership, and in 2016 embarked on large scale modern lode exploration for the first time in the district’s history. Top-of-bedrock soil augering was conducted over the Lucky Hill and Gold Hill massifs, delineating several anomalies with extremely high gold values. Reprocessing and analysis of a state-flown DIGEM aeromag and EM survey was conducted in 2018, revealing several new target zones. Further rock and soil gridding is planned on several other prospect areas on the property, while systematic core drilling programs have begun testing known anomalous zones and expanding the historic resource in the TMC zone. Deep drilling on the TMC zone in 2017 encountered several significant high-grade intercepts with coarse gold in quartz veins, including 51.05 ppm gold over 3.31 meters, 23.52 ppm gold over 5.71 meters, and 4.33 ppm gold over 9.82 meters. Open to the east and west along strike, as well as down dip, the TMC zone represents a bulk-mineable underground vein target with high grade zones, and significant size potential. Drilling during the 2018 season focused on the nearby Lucky Saddle and Lucky Top prospects, encountering intercepts such as 9.62 ppm gold over 2.24 meters, and 12.64 ppm gold over 2.05 meters.
Valdez Creek Mining and Exploration has drilled 12,200 meters of core on the property over the 2017-2018 seasons, and will be aggressively adding to that figure going forward. The Valdez Creek project, with its large, relatively unexplored land package, many identified gold prospects, and location at the head of one of the largest placer deposits ever mined in North America, has excellent potential to be the next major Alaskan discovery.