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Marmota launches SA gold drilling at Campfire Bore
Brought to you by BULLS N’ BEARS
By Doug Bright
Marmota has launched its first-ever drilling campaign at the company’s Campfire Bore project, about 30km west/north-west of its flagship Aurora Tank gold discovery in South Australia’s Gawler Craton.
The company has planned 165 reverse circulation (RC) drillholes for 16,500m to test extensive gold anomalism in calcrete in a trend measuring about 1.4 km by 250m. It is understood the ground has not had a drill bit put into it since 2018.
Marmota has launched its first-ever reverse-circulation program within its Golden Moon joint venture tenements in South Australia.
Campfire Bore is part of Marmota’s recently-formed Golden Moon joint venture (JV) with Coombedown Resources through its 100 per cent-owned subsidiary Half Moon, which was established with a goal to expand the resources within two adjacent exploration licences.
Under the terms of the JV, Marmota owns 90 per cent of the tenements and minerals, with Coombedown being free-carried until a decision to mine. Half Moon is the project manager.
‘The commencement of drilling at Campfire Bore heralds the beginning of a new era of gold exploration in the Gawler Craton.’
Marmota chairman Dr Colin Rose
The two Golden Moon JV licences, which are split into three separate blocks centred 25km north-west of Aurora Tank, are fully enclosed within Marmota’s extensive tenure. They contain four separate defined JORC-compliant resources – Mainwood with 12,000 ounces of gold, Greenewood with 46,000 ounces, Golf Bore with 119,000 ounces and Campfire Bore with 109,000 ounces.
It equates to a total of 286,000 ounces of the precious yellow metal in both inferred and indicated categories. Marmota says the Golden Moon deposits have had only minimal drilling historically when compared with Aurora Tank and have not seen a drill bit since Dominion’s work.
Consequently, Campfire Bore is not as advanced as Aurora Tank, where the company recently completed its July-August drilling program after ploughing through more than 7500m to reach an overall total of 60,000m of RC drilling.
Marmota chairman Dr Colin Rose said: “Golden Moon complements Aurora Tank brilliantly. The commencement of drilling at Campfire Bore heralds the beginning of a new era of gold exploration and resource growth in the Gawler Craton and is the first realisation of the new Golden Moon JV.”
Dr Rose says it is “remarkable” that, because of various legal transactions and other delays, no drilling has been undertaken on the promising tenements for many years. Earlier work on the ground was conducted by Dominion, which made the discovery of the Challenger gold mine.
Marmota expects to get assays back from its most recent Aurora tank drilling early next month and hopes they will support an inaugural resource model that will enable it to finalise an open-pit design for a heap leach operation. Management believes its Golden Moon JV ground has “enormous growth potential”, especially considering the paucity of recent work and the accompanying benefits of being able to use new exploration techniques and related technologies.
Additionally, all of the mineralisation defined so far lies within 100m from surface, implying easy access to open-pittable feedstock and the potential for low-cost heap leach processing of all or some of the JV resources. Many of the previous Campfire Bore drillholes were often only drilled to as little as 20m to 30m depth.
As Golden Moon lies within ready access to Aurora Tank, the company can use lessons learned and data gained from metallurgical studies in progress on potential feedstock from that project and there are also likely to be further economies of scale benefits. The planned drilling at Campfire Bore will considerably overshadow all prior RC work at the site, which amounted to 130 holes.
Marmota previously lodged a program for environment protection and rehabilitation application with the SA Department of Energy and Mining to allow it to begin drilling at Golden Moon, with the intention of kicking off its proposed work as soon as the approval was given.
Now with its finger on the start button, the company has initiated the first drilling program at Campfire Bore in six years and says it expects the substantial campaign to take about three months to complete. And then Half Moon may be able to prove that its Golden Moon is a full one.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: mattbirney@bullsnbears.com.au