Summary:
The Courageous Lake Project includes two deposits: the Courageous Lake deposit, and the Walsh Lake deposit.
Deposit Types
Courageous Lake deposit
The Courageous Lake deposit is a stratiform series of near-vertical, elongate lenticular mineralized domains hosted in Archean tuffaceous clastic rocks and ash-flow tuff. Gold mineralization is interpreted to be a product of an episodic, epithermal-like, submarine and subaerial, hydrothermal system.
Walsh Lake Deposit
The Walsh Lake zone is contained in quartz vein and silicic alteration within and surrounding shears. Mineralized material mineralogy is dominated by arsenopyrite and free gold. This style of orogenic gold deposit is common in Archean greenstone belts.
Mineralization
Courageous Lake Deposit Mineralization
Since its discovery, several common points have been used to describe the felsic ash tuff (FAT) deposit, including:
• A series of gold zones concentrated in long and narrow bands.
• The deposit is hosted by metasedimentary and metavolcanic rocks.
• Gold concentrations are associated with the introduction of silica, muscovite, and sulphide minerals.
The FAT deposit is located between the north shore of Matthews Lake and the south shore of Courageous Lake. It is made up of at least 13 discrete, steep east-dipping, elongate lenticular zones that vary in thickness from 20 to 125-m-wide. The continuity of these 13 zones has been demonstrated to be at least 1,900 m long, 800 m-wide and, although open at depth, at least 1200 m deep.
Walsh Lake Mineralization
The Walsh Lake target is 10 km south of the FAT deposit, adjacent and south of the historical Tundra Gold Mine that was abandoned in 1999. The north part of this target area is connected by a road network that links to the FAT deposit. Walsh Lake is interpreted to be a series of structural zones, parts of which are on strike with the deposits exploited in the Tundra Gold Mine.
The Walsh Lake target area stretches one and a half kilometer south from the former mine. This area has undergone several generations of exploration, including some limited past drilling campaigns showing these gold occurrences were located near a regional stratigraphic contact, which could provide significant strike potential. Gold-bearing quartz veins are hosted in sheared rocks near the contact between metamorphosed graywacke and mafic volcanic rocks. The metagraywacke units are fine to coarse sand size material with well preserved, laterally discontinuous, fining upward sequence of graded beds. This turbidite section is distinguished by the absence of volcanic and chemical sedimentary rocks intercalated in the Bouma beds. Metamorphosed mafic volcanic rocks are black to green-black, dense, fine grained, and typically show fragmental textures. These rocks are principally made up of fine hornblende and plagioclase laths, with localized irregular and fractured dark garnet crystals.
Drilling on the Walsh Lake contact zone consistently encounters silica alteration with gold-bearing intervals up to 20 m above the contact in siltstone and up to 60 m below the contact in mafic volcanic rocks interbedded with siltstone or felsic volcanic rocks. Gold is concentrated in arsenopyrite-bearing silica-altered sheared rocks containing abundant quartz veins, with true widths from one to 12 m. The shearing is almost parallel with bedding. This deformation event is associated with the tilting and regional metamorphism and focused along rheological changes in the stratigraphy.