International Tower Hill hits early stage properties: questions still lurking for mining bonanza.

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

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Modern day gold prospector Jeff Pontius is building the "perfect storm" to discover Alaska's next major mineral deposit.

As president of a well-funded junior exploration company that has hired experienced geologists known for finding gold, and holds 10 high-quality properties located in Central Alaska in various stages of exploration--Pontius appears to be sailing toward a mother lode.

The question is--which property will elevate his company, publicly traded International Tower Hill Mines Ltd. and its wholly owned subsidiary, Talon Gold, to a major discovery and possibly development status?

Pontius leans toward the company's Livengood property, which is the most advanced of the Alaska projects in terms of the quantity of geological work completed.

"Livengood is ITH's anchor project," Pontius said, during a tour of three of the company's Interior Alaska properties in mid-August. "A lot of groups have come out and looked at what we've got here."

Part of the interest in Livengood is a well-defined mineralized zone in a historically producing mining district, located on the road system about 60 miles north of Fairbanks.

Also interesting is a new discovery International Tower geologists have made on their project--a new style of sediment-hosted mineralization that is "substantially higher grade than anything else to date (often greater than .32 ounces of gold per ton of rock) and has the potential to dramatically enhance the economics of the Livengood deposit," the company said in its briefing booklet for the tour.

Another property that easily could slingshot International Tower into producer status is a high-grade gold prospect called Terra, located in the southwestern part of the Alaska Range, near the Rainy Pass area.

Fine gold is contained in quartz veins on the side of steeply sloping mountains at Terra, mineralization so rich that the claim's original staker continues to hack out ore by hand for his summer prospecting work.

The third property visited during the August tour is a grassroots Alaska Range prospect that Pontius staked in the Chisna area in 2006 and 2007, east of Paxson. Located 105 miles northwest of the Kennecott copper mine, Chisna has produced surface soil samples and rock-chip sampling, indicating a large, new copper and gold-bearing porphyry-hydrothermal system, according to the company's September 2007 press release.

Airborne surveys and ground geological work recently completed identified multiple targets of copper and gold mineralization over the company's...