Severance Property
The Severance Property consists of 222 Quartz Claims staked under the Yukon Quartz Mining Act in the Whitehorse Mining District. The geological exploration model is intrusive hosted gold (IHG) mineralization. Deposits of this class are attractive to mining companies because of their large size and often consistent grade. Analogs would include the Fort Knox and True North Deposits in the Fairbanks District, Alaska.
The Severance Property is located within intrusive rocks of the Dawson Range (Whitehorse Suite). These rocks host numerous gold occurrences along the length of a belt extending from Whitehorse, northwest, to the Yukon/Alaska border. During the Tintina Gold Belt exploration boom this belt was largely ignored because the preliminary geological consensus was that Dawson Range rocks were slightly older than the mineralization found at Pogo. Consequently, this area was not as favourable a target as Tombstone Plutonic Suite rocks located further north in the Yukon. Despite this, there are active hard rock gold exploration programs in the area including the Golden Revenue Property, located 70 km east of the Severance Property. In addition, numerous placer deposits occur north and east of the property in areas underlain by Dawson Range intrusive rocks.
The Severance Property lies between three regional Bouguer gravity lows and astride a northeast-trending magnetic lineament. Both of these geophysical signatures are similar to those associated with intrusive hosted gold mineralization in the Yukon and Alaska.
The potential of the area was realized when a Regional Geochemical Stream Sediment Sample, collected from drainage flowing into Somme Creek on the north side of the property returned 144 ppb gold and anomalous copper and molybdenum. In the 1970s, Atlas Exploration staked claims in the area to follow-up on the copper-molybdenum anomalies. They established a grid and conducted soil geochemical sampling and geological mapping. Their work located some anomalous values of copper and molybdenum in an alaskite stock and found traces of molybdenite in quartz veins. The occurrence is documented in the Yukon Minfile as the MIM showing, Minfile Number 115J 003 (DIAND, 2000).
In 1998, Kennecott Canada Ltd conducted reconnaissance stream sediment and soil sampling in the area to follow-up a government-sponsored RGS stream sediment sample that contained 280 ppb gold. Their program returned a number of samples anomalous in gold, bismuth and arsenic. Shortly after the discovery, Kennecott closed its Yukon exploration office and curtailed exploration activity in the Territory.
4763 NWT Ltd. staked the Severance Property in January, 2002, covering the area of anomalous soils. In the summer of 2002, the company conducted an exploration program consisting of geological mapping, prospecting and soil sampling. A grid was established to cover an area measuring 1.7 km by 1 km and soil samples were collected on lines spaced 100 m apart at a station spacing of 50 m. The soil program returned some significantly anomalous values with 31 of 344 samples returning greater than 100 parts per billion (ppb) gold, including four samples with 600, 738, 1965 and 2680 ppb gold, respectively. Coincident with the gold is copper, molybdenum, and arsenic - all considered key pathfinder elements associated with intrusion-related copper-gold systems (IRCGs). Rock sample results include a grab sample of silicified and quartz-veined granodiorite with 7% disseminated pyrite, which assayed 1.2 g/t gold and 0.35% copper. In general, results from the 2002 soil sampling program show good correlation for gold, copper, arsenic, and molybdenum, and indicate a gradient with more anomalous values for these elements on the southern part of the grid. Also, there are two or three northwest trending linear anomalous zones across the grid area and possibly a northeast trending zone in the southeast part of the property.
On March 18 2003, Eagle Plains announced that it had negotiated an agreement with 4763 NWT Ltd. (subject to regulatory approval) whereby EPL may earn a 100% interest in the claims by paying 100,000 common shares and completing $40,000 in exploration expenditures over two years. A 2% NSR is reserved for the vendor, half of which may be purchased at any time for $1,000,000. Eagle Plains will further reserve for the vendors 25% of the proceeds from any subsequent third-party sale or option of the claims, to a maximum of $100,000.
The 2003 Eagle Plains exploration program consisted of prospecting, soil and silt sampling and a small ground EM survey. Preliminary results from the 2003 work confirm the potential for an intrusion related copper gold system on the property.
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