Properties

Champion Hills Gold Project

The Champion Hills Project is comprised of multiple historic pits and workings within a 25 kilometer long trend in North Carolina, located within the Carolina Slate Belt.  This area hosts most of the area's past producers, most notably the Ridgeway Mine, which produced 1.5Moz of gold from 1988 to 1999.   South Carolina's Haile Mine with an estimated resource of 4.2Moz is also in the Slate Belt.  The Champion Hills project is geologically analogous to these deposits; gold mineralization is hosted within quartz-sericite-pyrite altered volcanic rocks, associated with northeast trending shear zones. 

Gold was discovered in Champion Hills in the early 1800's, with small scale production from many small operations.  Mining continued in the area through the 1930's depression era.  Noranda explored Champion Hills for shallow, open-pit gold deposits from 1989 to 1992, completing 23 core holes totaling 2,936 meters.  This drilling encountered multiple drill intercepts averaging over 0.5 to 1.3 g/t Au over long intervals, including several holes that terminated in mineralization at depth. 

 

Regional Geology

The geologic history of the area is widely debated and poorly understood largely due to extensive forest cover and the presence of thick saprolite weathered cover overlying bedrock. Nonetheless, the major gold mineral deposits of the Slate Belt, like Haile (+4.2 Moz) and Ridgeway (~2.2Moz) are generally described as stratabound high-sulphidation epithermal bulk tonnage gold deposits, having affinities to major international deposits such as Hope Brook, NL Canada (~1.5 Moz), Pueblo Viejo, Dominican Republic (~22 Moz) and El Indio-Tambo, Chile (~4.5 Moz).

Primary gold deposition is related to an ancient volcanic and sea-floor exhalative (‘hot-spring’) island arc environment (Late Proterozoic-early Cambrian age or 500 to 650 Mya). Later secondary gold enrichment is induced via subtle remobilization into broad structural zones (folds & shears) created during regional scale tectonism (Paleozoic era); up to greenschist metamorphic facies.

Gold mineralization is found in strong association with pyrite, arsenopyrite, carbonate, sericite and quartz-silica flooding, within broad zones of low-grade gold (~1 gpt) sometimes enveloping higher grade feeder zones (> 5 gpt).  These gold deposits are commonly marked by surface geochemical signatures anomalous in gold, arsenic, antimony, molybdenum, and base metals and also by geophysical signatures utilizing very low frequency electromagnetic, magnetic, and induced polarization methods.