Freegold ventures advances Golden Summit: bulk-sampling project to yield geological information, gold.

• Author: Liles, Patricia
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: MINING ISSUE

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Steadily falling snow in late September and a quiet equipment yard at the Golden Summit project didn't dampen Michael Gross' enthusiasm. He's the vice president of exploration for Freegold Ventures and a moving force behind the company's recent, rapid advancement of its Fairbanks-area gold property.

"There's so much more potential here than what I imagined when looking at the data a year-and-a-half ago," said Gross, during a tour of Golden Summit, a large claim block that has been explored by the Vancouver-based junior exploration company for nearly 20 years. "It has amazed all of us--how widespread the gold mineralization is ... much more than what we thought last fall."

Despite a long history of working Golden Summit, sometimes with partners and sometimes going it alone, Freegold has changed the focus and mode of work recently, thanks to new corporate management with a different view of the property.

Gross and Steve Manz, named president of Golden Summit about two years ago, are part of the new plan for the Fairbanks-area property, as well as Freegold's other properties in Alaska and a well-defined gold project in Nevada.

At Golden Summit, the focus is still on exploration, but with a twist to the traditional methods of drilling diamond core or reverse circulation holes and plugging the data into a geological model.

The company is using a smaller-sized drill rig, a rotary air blast unit, to complete shallow, closely spaced drilling sections, called fences--work designed to identify and trace high-grade gold zones for bulk sampling.

KEEP IT HERE

But instead of collecting piles of rock and sending it to Outside laboratories for treatment, Freegold decided to do the analysis on-site. Independent, initial laboratory tests completed last year indicated that Freegold could expect to achieve 70 percent to 79 percent recovery of gold from its host rock through simple crushing and gravity processing.

Crews began last year assembling some bulk sample piles for processing, with plans to run the material through a sluice box, a separation method combining water and gravity that is commonly used by placer miners.

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"We ran out of weather (for sluicing) so we kept digging and creating stockpiles," Gross said. "Over the winter, we decided that rather than sluicing the piles, we could set up a process to gain a better rate of recovery."

Freegold found a used Knelson concentrator and some other used and new...