This year is shaping up to be a bit of a breakout year for the company as the potential of its Yundamindra and Kookynie projects in the Laverton-Leonora district starts to emerge.

“The next 6-12 months is gearing up to be really exciting, and hopefully, game-changing,” Arika managing director Justin Barton told a Resources Rising Stars webinar.

Both projects are surrounded by multi-million-ounce deposits.

“We’re in elephant country and we’re hunting elephants,” Barton said.

Earlier this month, Arika raised A$5 million in an oversubscribed placement managed by Canaccord Genuity and Bell Potter Securities.

Directors chipped in A$700,000 to the placement, which gives the company around A$6 million to accelerate exploration.

“We’ll probably get three, four, potentially even five really good programs in before we need to go back to the market,” Barton said.

The company has upsized its upcoming drilling programs from 6000m to 10,000m of aircore, reverse circulation and diamond drilling.

Yundamindra

The Yundamindra project is the more advanced of Arika’s prospects with Barton estimating it’s about 12 months ahead of Kookynie.

It’s also where Arika has had recent exploration success with the first drilling at the project in about two decades.

Roughly 97% of previous drilling is to depths of less than 50m, while just 1% of the identified structures have been drill tested.

Recent exploration success has been at the Pennyweight Point prospect with the first diamond results including 35.7m at 2.14 grams per tonne gold from 104.3m, including 13.5m at 5.28g/t gold and 1.5m at 9.01g/t and 6.13m at 8g/t; and 24m at 2.54g/t gold from 162m, including 5.4m at 10.62g/t gold from 170.5m and 4.3m at 13.05g/t.

The results were less than 150m to the south of an earlier hit of 14m at 15.48g/t gold from 46m.

Pennyweight Point sits on a 4.5km structure but only 300m of the strike length has been drilled to date, while there are multiple parallel structures yet to be tested.

“We’re really building towards a significant deposit and discovery really quickly,” Barton said.

“There’s a lot of smoke on this project, there’s a lot of signs that this is a really significant mineralised system and we’re now at the stage to start testing how big this system is.”

Arika has also had exploration success in the project’s 16km-long western corridor, dubbed the “Yellow Brick Road”, primarily at the Landed at Last prospect.

The F1-Fault prospect at Landed at Last returned 14.8m at 3.1g/t gold from 87m, including 2.15m at 5.49g/t and 2.25m at 9.76g/t from the first diamond hole.

“There’s really significant ounces in the ground already just from the limited work we’ve done,” Barton said.

With dozens of other targets to test, Barton suggested Pennyweight Point and Landed at Last may not be the best deposits at Yundamindra.

“It’s quite possible that there’ll be two or three other areas,” he said.

“There’s so much smoke, we’ve really got to find the main fire. We’re hopeful we’re the next multimillion ounce discovery.”

Yundamindra also sits on granted mining leases, which presents the opportunity for early cash through toll milling.

The project sits within 50km of six mills, including the hungry Sunrise Dam, Mt Morgans and Granny Smith plants.

“If we wanted to, we could monetise this really quickly,” Barton said.

“The reality is, there’s so many significant players around us and we know they’ve already got their eyes on us because we sit on mining leases, high-grade, close to surface…they’re looking for high grade and we’re sitting on significant high-grade feed in the area.”

Kookynie emerging

Arika has just wrapped up a four-month review of the data at Kookynie and soil sampling at three prospects.

“It’s a little bit of a forgotten project but it’s equally as exciting,” Barton said.

Yesterday, the company reported the results of ultrafine soil geochemistry at the Ithaca deposit, which identified 10 high-priority targets.

Ithaca is immediately adjacent to, and along strike from, Genesis Minerals’ Ulysses underground mine, which has a resource of 2Moz of gold.

Two of the highest priority targets sit directly along strike from the Orient Well, Orient Well East and Blevins Find-Grafters gold-hosting structures.

Target IGTA 3 covers roughly 800m by 150m along the northeast flank of the Orient Well East/Blevins Find gold-hosting porphyry, while Target IGTA 5 is a 2km by 1km target along the southeast extension to the Orient Well structure at the intersection with an interpreted north-northeast trending splay fault.

Arika’s neighbour Carnavale Resources has had recent exploration success at its own Kookynie project.

The company is planning to drill at Kookynie once all approvals have been received, which is likely to occur in the coming months.