Alto Metals plans to infill fine-fraction soil sampling at its Sandstone gold project in Western Australia’s Mid West region to better resolve a 6km-long gold-arsenic soil anomaly defined by its first program.
The original sampling was on an open 400m grid, but the company says it will now conduct infill sampling on 40m-by-40m spacing to capture about 400 samples from more than 1.2km of strike.
The defined anomaly coincides with a string of historic, high-grade gold workings that threw up previous drilling results including 15m at 9.1 grams per tonne from 82m including 3m going 32.1g/t and 13m at 5.2g/t from 34m including 1m at an eyebrow-raising 58g/t gold from 39m.
The infill decision arises from Alto’s interpretation of previous drilling around the historical workings that shows gold mineralisation comprises north-trending, high-grade plunging shoots with limited strike persistence. Some of the known shoots have a strike length of just 50m within the top 100m, although at this stage they remain open at depth and along strike.
That means a soil sampling grid of insufficient density could miss some important high-grade gold zones and compromise the possible scope of future drill planning … hence the infill strategy.
Management is continuing its low-cost regional targeting work, including the review of historical data sets, while it presses ahead with growing its resource targets on the Sandstone gold project. The high grades reported from the project highlight the under-explored potential of Alto’s tenure, which encloses more than 740 square kilometres of the northern and eastern parts of the Sandstone greenstone belt, situated about 6km north of the WA town of Sandstone.
The project covers the nose of the fold in the greenstone belt where it is situated between the converging major regional Edale Shear on its eastern flanks and the regional Youanmi Shear on its western flank. The company’s total indicated and inferred resources for its Sandstone gold project currently stand at 23.5 million tonnes at a grade of 1.4g/t gold for a total of 1.05 million ounces of contained gold.
Alto plans to soon kick off an initial program of reconnaissance air-core (AC) drilling, following the receipt of results from the infill sampling and all other access clearances and approvals.
The string of high-grade soil gold anomalies obtained from the initial sampling provide the company with good reason to hope for some meaningful results to come from the drilling. Then, upon further development, the results might just add to Alto’s handsome – and growing – resource inventory.
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