Snowline Gold Corp. (CSE:SGD) has reported on its 2023 exploration plans and reflected on its trajectory in 2022 which, with a substantial drill discovery at the Valley gold target on the Rogue Project and a $25.2 million financing completed, was a transformative year for the company.
"In an otherwise difficult market, our efforts to build Snowline as a company and to rapidly advance our projects in an underexplored district demonstrate the value of discovery," said Scott Berdahl, CEO & director of Snowline in the update.
"Valley is unique in that at such an early stage, it ticks many of the boxes required of an economic gold discovery. It has scale, it has large zones of consistent mineralization with good gold grades, it has a favourable geometry, and its strongest grades-up to 4.1 g/t Au over 108.0m-begin at surface.
"When we launched Snowline to explore an apparently unrecognized gold district, it's exactly the sort of discovery we were hoping to make. The existence of Valley has strong positive implications for the potential of our other targets in the district, where we are just scratching the surface. As we look ahead to 2023, I would like to thank our investors, our strong shareholders, our team, and the many partners and supporters who have contributed to making Snowline a success," he added.
READ: Snowline Gold unveils additional assay results from 2022 drilling program at its Rogue Project showing more gold mineralisation
Snowline was founded less than two years ago to explore a previously unrecognized gold district in Canada's Yukon. Multiple drill discoveries in this short window have led to substantial value creation, while validating and underscoring the broader exploration potential of Snowline's target rich more than 280,000 hectare land position in the prolific Selwyn Basin.
Snowline's top 5 highlights from 2022:
- Discovery: Drilled 318.8 metres (m) of 2.55 grams per ton (g/t) gold (Au) from surface among other widely spaced highlight holes at Valley, revealing a substantial and unusually high-grade reduced intrusion-related gold system (RIRGS). 5,080m of analytical results from the 2022 Valley drill campaign are still pending
- Community: Established a green energy partnership with Nacho Nyak Dun Development Corporation, providing Snowline's main camp with a 27-kW solar power facility, reducing emissions, reducing costs, and building ties with First Nations and Yukon businesses
- Growth: Recruited a strong in-house exploration and management team, with breadth and depth of experience paralleled by few companies in the junior mining space
- Strength: Closed a non-brokered $25.2 million financing, allowing Snowline to ramp up scale and pace of exploration mid-season. Snowline will enter 2023 with a treasury of $22.3 million, allowing for aggressive exploration through 2023 and beyond
- Performance: 311% appreciation in share price to date from January 1, 2022, ranking Snowline among the top exploration and mining companies globally for share price performance in 2022 and rewarding its discovery-focused approach. For the second straight year, Snowline has seen triple-digit returns (133% in 2021).
Additional exploration highlights from 2022 include:
- Construction of 50-person 'Forks' camp and adjacent 1,000m airstrip in central location between Valley and Jupiter discoveries, efficiently servicing the Company's Rogue, Einarson, Ursa and Cynthia projects
- Acquisition of Golden Oly project, including seven intrusions similar in age to Valley and prospective for Valley-style RIRGS gold mineralization, along with a diverse package of additional Selwyn Basin gold prospects
- Significant asset expansion through staking using our proprietary regional database and in-field knowledge of regional geology and mineralization to strategically expand our claim position by 2.7 times (including acquisitions) to more than 280,000 hectares
- Commencement of environmental survey work at Valley including monthly water quality monitoring, hydrology, pre-disturbance botanical inventories and wildlife surveying, providing a baseline of knowledge for future advanced-stage permitting
- Visible gold in Phase I drilling at Gracie, a buried intrusion 4 kilometres (km) east of Valley, putting Snowline three-for-three on discovery of visible gold in its drill programs, each on never-before-drill-tested targets. Assays for all five holes at Gracie (2,152m) are pending
- Advancement of all Yukon projects, with extensive geological, geophysical and geochemical surface programs moving new targets towards drill readiness across Snowline's extensive Yukon exploration portfolio.
2023 Exploration plans
With a strong treasury and three diamond drills parked on-site at Valley, Snowline said it is looking forward to another highly active exploration season in 2023.
Through the year, the company said it will adhere to its commitment to safe, environmentally sound, and socially responsible exploration, building on its economic engagement within the Yukon and further strengthening lines of communication and consultation with First Nations and Yukon communities.
The scale and nature of the 2023 program will be finalized following receipt and interpretation of remaining drill results from Valley and Gracie on the Rogue project, alongside analytical results from surface programs across Snowline's portfolio.
The company expects to drill a significant amount at Valley in 2023 to expand, delineate and de-risk the discovery while collecting data useful to resource estimation. At the same time, the company intends to drill multiple additional targets, using 2022 Phase I drill results from Gracie to vector towards a mineralized intrusive source to that anomaly, and performing first-pass drilling on new targets with the goal of making substantial additional discoveries.
Initial metallurgical testing of Valley material will commence in Q1 2023. The company is also exploring options to streamline sample processing for analytical results, to avoid the long wait times for analytical results experienced in 2022.
In addition, Snowline announced that its board of directors has granted a total of 2,350,000 incentive stock options to various employees, consultants, directors, and officers of the company.
The options are exercisable for one share each at $2.88 per share for a period of five years and are subject to the terms of the company's stock option plan. options are subject to vesting provisions of 20% every six months from the date of the grant.
Contact the author at jon.hopkins@proactiveinvestors.com