The Astro project is a new gold discovery located in the Mackenzie Mountains along the Northwest Territories (NWT) -Yukon border. The 250 square-kilometre project area is located 195 kilometres northeast of Ross River and six kilometres north of the Mile 222 airstrip at the end of the Canol Road in NWT. Evrim Resources, in partnership with Newmont-Goldcorp, conducted two field seasons of generative exploration in the Misty Creek Embayment targeting areas of anomalous regional government survey (RGS) stream-sediment geochemistry in areas of prospective geology and structure. That work led to the identification of an area of gold anomalism flanking the eastern margin of the Border pluton, a Cretaceous granodiorite intruding deep water carbonate and siliciclastic rocks of the Misty Creek Embayment.
In 2018, work at Astro involved follow-up stream-sediment and soil sampling that outlined a ten-kilometer-long corridor of gold anomalism originating from a series of northwest-striking faults exposed along the range front. The faults offset sandstone, siltstone and lime mudstone intruded by the Border pluton and the smaller Mehitabel intrusion in Yukon. Prospecting along the corridor initially identified the Radio prospect, a magnetite-pyrite skarn horizon that returned 30m @17.7g/t gold in chip-channel samples, and the Microwave prospect, an exposure of silicified, gossanous sandstone that returned 11m @ 2.25g/t gold from chip-channel samples. The 2018 program also outlined two other coherent gold-in-soil anomalies over areas of sparse outcrop and thin till cover along the range front and resulted in the designation of the Astro Project
This year, field work on the Astro Project included focussed mapping and sampling, hand trenching, an airborne geophysical survey and 11 reverse-circulation (RC) holes totalling 1,111 metres. The results from this program continue to highlight a structural corridor of gold prospects extending for at least ten kilometres. The mapping program identified another gold-bearing skarn one kilometre southeast of Radio and gold-bearing quartz veins in siltstone west of Radio. The RC scout drilling program, in turn identified several new gold-bearing zones, including an interval of mineralized granodiorite east of Radio and silicified siltstone in a range-bounding fault at the Gamma prospect. Results to date display a zonation from gold-bismuth±copper showings in proximity to the Border pluton outward to gold-arsenic-antimony occurrences in siltstone and intrusive rocks along the range front.