The Alexander Gold Property comprises 27 patented mining claims covering 448 hectares (1,107 acres) adjoining Evolution Mining’s Red Lake-Campbell Complex. Our target on the Alexander Gold Property is an extension, or repetition, of the mineralization at the Red Lake Gold Mine.
Our property is situated just beyond the security gate at the Red Lake Gold Mine and is almost completely surrounded by Evolution’s Red Lake-Campbell Complex, which comprises the historic Dickenson (now Red Lake Gold Mine) and Campbell Mines, with multiple shafts and associated processing facilities.
The stratigraphy under the property remains essentially untested below 700 metres depth. The richest gold bearing ore zones exist below a vertical depth of 1,300 metres in the High-Grade Zone at the Red Lake Gold Mine, which is less than 800 metres from the property boundary.
Deposit Potential
Located Adjacent to Evolution Mining’s Red Lake Mines in the heart of the highest-grade gold camp in North America having produced more than 25M ounces of gold at an average grade in excess of 20 g/t over the past 72 years.
Economically viable gold mineralization in the area tends to form in moderate to steep south-dipping and westerly raking lenses, which at the Campbell, Red Lake and High Grade Zone deposits have been demonstrated to form spatially “stacked” lense deposits.
Underground development, mining and exploration activities by the adjacent Red Lake Gold Mine continue to successfully add resources to the gold reserve on a yearly basis.
The Property is located within the important “Mine Trend” regional structure. The western boundary of our property is approximately 500 meters east of the Balmer headframe and its Aviation zone exploration target area.
Geology
The mineralization within the Red Lake Mines can be classified as an Archean greenstone belt – hosted gold deposit.
The majority of mineralization in these types of deposits is intimately associated with quartz-carbonate (calcite, ankerite or siderite) veins with persistent sericite-carbonate alteration haloes in highly deformed, Archean host rocks that have been regionally metamorphosed to lower or middle greenschist facies
Mineralized zones in the Red Lake – Campbell deposit are distinguished first by spatial orientation relative to structural corridors and second by the style of mineralization. It is common for mineralized zones to have multiple style of mineralization within the same host lithology. There are four types of mineralization in the Red Lake – Campbell Deposit:
Vein style gold mineralization
Vein and sulphide style gold mineralization
Disseminated sulphide style mineralization (often referred to as replacement style mineralization)
Free fold mineralization style
Overall, the geology of the area is complex at regional and property scales where at least three phases of deformation and at least two mineralizing events have been recognized. An abundance of industry-led and academic focused journal articles, thesis projects, and government/industry collaborative efforts have characterized the unconventional and spectacularly high-grade gold deposits of the Red Lake Mining district.
Exploration on the Alexander Gold Property
Since the acquisition of the Alexander Gold Property in 2002, Conquest has completed a total of 31,086 metres of surface exploration diamond drilling in 55 drill holes between 2003 through to 2011.
2003-2004:
6,088 metres of drilling comprising 25 drill holes were completed during a drill program designed to test near-surface geophysical and soil geochemical anomalies. This drilling is summarized in a report entitled “Technical Report on Exploration” (See Below)
An additional 2,073 metres of drilling comprising 7 drill holes were completed during Winter 2004, the results of which are discussed in a Technical Report entitled “Technical Report on Exploration at the Alexander Gold Project in Red Lake, Ontario” dated November 21, 2012 (See Below).
2004-2009:
Exploration activities on the Property during the 5 year period December 2004 through August 2009 included an induced polarization (IP) geophysical survey conducted during 2004 and 2005, and a surface trench mapping and sampling program conducted during 2004 and 2010.
2009-2010:
Concurrent with the planning of Conquest’s 2009 and 2010 surface exploration diamond drilling programs, an exploration program was conducted by Goldcorp (former owner of the Red Lake Complex) on Evolution Mining’s mine claims located immediately adjacent to the western Alexander Property claim boundary.
As part of that program, four (4) exploration drill holes were collared on the adjacent Red Lake – Campbell property at surface, which intersected the Conquest Alexander property boundary at depth. One of these located a significant gold intersection of 4.97 gpt gold over 1.82 metres, including 14.25 gpt over 0.61m.
Information pertaining to those hole segments which lie under the Alexander Property, which totals 1,911 metres of drilling, was provided digitally to Conquest by Goldcorp.
Goldcorp also provided Conquest with regional and property scale airborne geophysical data interpretations. The information was supplied in graphical form as coloured contour maps at the property-scale over the Alexander claim group and portions of the area immediately surrounding Conquest’s claims, which are currently owned by Evolution Mining
During 2009, Conquest completed 4,200 metres of drilling in a six-hole diamond drill program where gold mineralization was intersected in all six exploration drill holes. This program doubled the vertical profile of the known geology to a vertical depth of 730 metres and intersected numerous sheared and altered lithologies containing 1.0 to 9.4 g/t gold over intervals of one to two metres in thickness.
Conquest continued to drill throughout 2010 in its second phase of deep exploration drilling. The Company completed 9,030 metres of drilling including 7,755 metres under the deep western portion and the balance on the Sulphide Shear Zone in the central portions of the property. The Sulphide Shear Zone is a zone of sulphide mineralization in the central part of the property with associated gold values. Several narrow intersections of high-grade gold (up to 17.6 g/t gold) have been encountered in relatively shallow drilling within quartz-carbonate veins and intrusives that are spatially associated with the hydrothermal conduits created by the development of shear zones.
2011:
Conquest completed a further 9,802 metres of NQ-sized drilling on the Alexander Gold Property. This drilling focused on three areas:
The deep target area under the western portion of the property was in-part tested by a parent and wedge hole pair of drill holes collared from Evolution Mining’s Red Lake mine property which crossed on to Conquest’s Alexander Property at depth.
A sulphide bearing shear zone in the center of the property, named the Central Sulphide Shear Zone, was tested at depth with three (3) drill holes to hole depths of 1,479 metres.
A third area was tested with four (4) holes to depths of 1,095 metres following the discovery of a sulphide-bearing shear zone independent of Conquest’s Central Sulphide Shear Zone which was named the Eastern Sulphide Shear Zone.
2018:
Goldcorp reported that its exploration activity at Red Lake had been extended to encompass generative exploration programs over its highly prospective Red Lake land package.
Drilling focus continues to shift eastwards towards portions of the mine containing favorable geology and structure, but which remain underexplored. The Aviation zone, which comprises folded Balmer Assemblage basalt, was identified during this generative phase.
2019:
Newmont/Goldcorp announced that it had agreed to sell the Red Lake complex to Evolution Mining Limited. Upon closing of the transaction in April 2020 Evolution committed to invest US$100 million on existing operations and an additional US$50 million in exploration at Red Lake over the first three-year period.
Upon closing of the acquisition, Evolution reported that “The driver for our interest was both the outstanding potential for the discovery of new, high grade mineralisation and clear turnaround opportunity to restore it to being a safe, efficient, long life, low cost operation.”
In a Goldcorp technical report describing the exploration potential at Red Lake, it was stated that “there is considerable remining exploration potential in the vicinity of the current mining operations…. (The) Aviation Complex encompasses several exploration targets in the under-explored eastern portion of the Red Lake Complex. Targets include Twin Otter Zone, Snowbird Zone and Norseman Zone with other exploration targets hosted within the regional fold nose yet to be tested. The Swamp target is in the low-lying area between the Red Lake and Balmer Complexes This target occurs in the footwall of the rhyolite basalt contact in the upper eastern part of the Red Lake mine.”
The Balmer Assemblage is host to the high-grade gold ores at the Red Lake mine and the Balmer Assemblage stratigraphy that characterizes the well-established Mine Trend at Red Lake is present in drill holes on Conquest’s Alexander Property.
The Mine Trend stratigraphy strikes northwest to southeast through Conquest’s patented claim group. Conquest’s previous 2009, 2010 and 2011 drilling on the Alexander Property reported gold grades of up to 12.67 g/t over 1 meter.
2020:
In August 2020, Evolution reported a new Mineral Resource estimate for its Red Lake mines of 48 million tonnes grading 7.10 grams per tonne, for 11.0 million ounces gold, stating that this is materially higher than what was estimated during the due diligence which provided justification to proceed with the acquisition of the operation. This new estimate incorporates Evolution’s estimation methodology and is reported in accordance with the JORC Code 2012.
Evolution stated it will spend US$50 million on exploration in the first three years with a planned drill program of over 100,000 metres per annum. “The small footprint of Red Lake’s historic high-grade ore bodies enhances the potential for further discoveries across the operation”.
Evolution also reported resource definition and discovery drilling is ongoing with six underground drill rigs, four rigs focused on infill and resource extension drilling and two rigs were deployed on discovery drilling. Evolution reported the best resource definition infill hole intersected 1.11 meters (0.88 estimated true width) grading 106.30 g/t gold from 204m in the Twin Otter zone, (which lies at the eastern end of the Red Lake mine property).
2021:
Evolution continued to ramp-up production at Red Lake during Q1 of 2021 and reported that production increased to a record of 35,810 ounces under Evolution ownership.
Subsequent to the end of Q1 on May 19, 2021, Evolution completed the acquisition of Battle North Gold Corporation (TSX: BNAU) for approximately $343 million. This expands Evolution’s footprint in the Red Lake region and will accelerate its ability to achieve its long-term objective of producing in excess of 300,000 ounces of gold per year from the Red Lake.
Bateman Gold Project Mineral Resources (excluding Mineral Reserves) are 733,000 ounces and Mineral Reserves are 635,000 ounces estimated in accordance with the NI43-101 Standards. (Source: https://evolutionmining.com.au/red-lake/).
Future Exploration Work:
Additional work is recommended to fully evaluate the mineral potential of the Alexander Property due to the close proximity of the Property to the world-class gold deposits at Red Lake and on the basis that anomalous gold mineralization has been located through drilling and trenching on the Property at shallow depths.
Gold mineralization at the adjacent mines is very deep and is often not identifiable in the structures which are present at surface. Recommendations have been made to acquire the underlying data of the 2008 airborne geophysical survey by Goldcorp which should be integrated into a new geophysical interpretation of the Property for the purposes of target generation for future drill programs.
Conquest intends to continue monitoring activities by Evolution on its adjacent property and to carry out its own desktop examination of historical data for the Alexander Property with the intent to remap the Balmer Assemblage within the Alexander Property.
Exploration programs on the Alexander Property have been limited in size and scale due to the limited availability of funding. A property-wide, extensive deep drilling program of 20,000 metres of drilling combined with down-hole electromagnetic and induced polarization geophysics will provide the best chance of making a gold discovery of significant size at depth under the Alexander Property.
