Great Bear Resources Ltd (CVE:GBR) saw shares surge over 14% Monday as it reported encouraging geological finds from its flagship Dixie project in the Red Lake district of Ontario.
New mapping has found a critical ultramafic rock unit in outcrop with an interpreted strike length of at least 2km. The work has also shown further high-priority drill targets, it said.
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A fully financed 30,000m, around 150-drill-hole program is now underway that will continue through the remainder of 2018 and 2019, with results to be released on a regular basis.
"With generally a few metres of overburden covering most of the project, bedrock is mostly concealed at Dixie and the extensive gold system was completely missed during the historical Red Lake gold rush," said Chris Taylor, president and CEO at Great Bear.
"This also means our drill area was not geologically mapped.
"Great Bear's geological interpretation suggests we are drilling a dominantly mafic greenstone belt with comparable geological, structural, alteration and gold mineralization characteristics to the main Red Lake greenstone belt, where over 30,000,000 ounces of gold has been produced from 28 gold mines."
Great Bear also noted that so far several kilometres of additional strike length of highly prospective geology had now been defined for drill testing.
These targets are on top of the original Dixie Limb zone (DLZ) target which has a geophysically defined strike length of around 10km and has seen most of the project's drilling.
All of the more than 100 drill holes which have hit the DLZ have encountered gold mineralization.
Great Bear said it will continue to explore and define its high-grade gold discoveries at the DLZ, Hinge and SLZ zones, however, the new discovery of spatially extensive ultramafic units adds an additional number of high-priority drill targets that will also be tested during the current drill program.
Shares in Toronto leapt nearly 18% to $3.15 each.