Trek, which features Pilbara Minerals co-founders Neil Biddle, John Young and Tony Leibowitz, has been focused on making a discovery across its portfolio in northern WA.

The Christmas Creek project, southwest of Halls Creek, was a project previously explored by Newmont Corporation.

Newmont spent about A$6 million over six years on exploration, which yielded some promising results including 7m at 4.9 grams per tonne gold, including 1m at 29.6g/t gold; 2m at 9.65g/t gold; 4m at 1.22g/t from 8m; 3m at 2.03g/t gold, all from shallow depths.

“The project sits here at the triple junction of the Halls Creek orogen, King Leopold orogen, and where these structures come through from the Tanami,” Trek CEO Derek Marshall said.

Christmas Creek sits under shallow sand cover so it hasn’t been subjected to any historical production or prospecting.

The project was originally pegged by well-regarded geologist Dr Jon Hronsky, who identified its potential.

During the December quarter, Trek designed a maiden drilling program at Christmas Creek’s Martin prospect to follow up Newmont’s hit of 2m at 9.65g/t gold.

The follow-up hole returned 10m at 12.66g/t gold from 59m, including 1m at 32.6g/t gold and 3m at 29.8g/t gold; and 10m at 7.34g/t gold from 94m, including 2m at 31.1g/t gold and 1m at 7.85g/t gold.

“So amazing grades and thicknesses, but I guess the worry in the market and for myself was, because it was RC drilling, have we just drilled down something? And that was the feedback from quite a few people,” Marshall said.

To address those concerns, Trek conducted a down-hole televiewer survey to verify the results.

The data suggested the hole drilled across the veins and not down them, which added weight to the interpretation that there is a stacked vein system at Martin with scale potential.

It also showed that the previously reported intercepts were likely close to true width.

“It shows that, [Newmont] have drilled and jagged one vein, then we’ve gone and hit multiple veins, so that’s showing scale potential,” Marshall said.

Trek recently held another targeting session with Hronsky, who was encouraged by the televiewer data.

According to Marshall, Hronsky said the mineralisation potentially shared characteristics with the large Tanami deposits over the border in the Northern Territory.

“It’s the same sort of style. It’s orogenic gold. The Tanami sequence and the Halls Creek sequence, they’re the same age, same sort of structures,” Marshall said.

Promising target

Marshall is also excited by the Zahn target at Christmas Creek.

“If you look at the project as a whole, and Newmont did all this surface geochemistry, there’s this big moving target,” he said.

“Newmont did all this aircore, and then they just did three RC holes, and they didn’t get any gold, but then they extended the soil profile around it and got another zone of gold sitting to the north, which structurally looks pretty interesting, because it’s along this major sort of magnetic boundary.”

Trek did some wide-spaced drilling along the 3km-long target and hit low-grade gold including 20m at 0.21g/t gold from 24m and 8m at 0.13g/t gold from 52m.

“I ran into the geo from Newmont that had been managing the project for six years, and he was super excited by that because we’d found something,” Marshall said.

Trek plans to do some more heritage clearing at both targets ahead of the next round of exploration drilling, which should coincide with the end of cyclone season.

“Within the next couple of months we’ve got the drill rig spinning, and if we have similar success, there’ll be more drill rigs coming,” Marshall said.

“We could be on the cusp of something big. I kind of didn’t really want to believe it, until we got this data in. Most exploration geologists are never involved in a discovery.

“I kind of feel like maybe we’ve drilled the discovery hole.

“It could be nothing, but the fact that there’s multiple veins and they’re kind of behaving themselves, there’s huge scale potential here.”