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Junior gold explorers in Nevada often live or die by how much ground they control around a promising discovery, and that reality is playing out again in Lincoln County. Toogood Gold Corp. (OTCQB: TGGCF, TSXV: TGC, FSE: D3P) has added 44 new claims to its Table Mountain project, pushing the total land package to 228 claims covering close to 1,902 hectares.
The claims were staked with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and sit along what the company calls the Widowmaker Trend, one of several arcuate structural corridors it has been mapping across the property. These corridors are essentially curved fracture systems in the rock, the kind of plumbing that can channel hot mineral rich fluids underground and, over millions of years, leave behind gold and silver deposits near the surface. By staking ground along the interpreted extension of the Widowmaker Trend and a second, roughly parallel trend, the company now controls more than 10 kilometers of combined strike length across those two structures.
Before committing to the expansion, the company ran a reconnaissance soil sampling program across the new claims, collecting 166 samples. That data will be layered on top of existing geological mapping, LiDAR surveys and geophysical readings the company already has for the broader project, giving the technical team a fuller picture of where the alteration and mineralization are strongest.
Colin Smith, the company’s CEO, framed the land addition as part of a broader effort to understand the size and structure of what geologists call a low sulphidation epithermal system, a type of gold silver deposit that forms relatively close to the earth’s surface from cooling hydrothermal fluids. He noted the new ground gives the team more room to work with as it moves toward identifying specific drill targets.
That work is set to ramp up this month. Toogood has brought in Zonge International to run about 20-line kilometers of a geophysical survey method known as controlled source audio frequency magnetotellurics, or CSAMT for short. In plain terms, the technique sends controlled electrical signals into the ground and measures how different rock types resist that current, which can help geologists see where silicification, faulting or alteration have altered the rock’s electrical properties well below what the eye can see at surface.
Alongside the geophysics, a separate contractor, Big Rock Exploration, will handle follow up prospecting, rock sampling and mapping, both along the priority corridors and across the wider alteration footprint that defines the project. The idea is to combine the underground picture from CSAMT with what is visible and sampleable at surface, narrowing the list of targets before any drill bit goes into the ground.
Table Mountain is one of two projects anchoring Toogood’s exploration strategy. The other is the Toogood Gold Project in Newfoundland, a 164 square kilometer land package the company also holds under an earn in option, situated in a gold district that has historically drawn less exploration attention than better known regions. Together, the two projects give the company exposure to different geological settings and jurisdictions, which can spread some of the risk that comes with early stage exploration.
For a company still in the exploration phase, expanding land position ahead of a scheduled field program is a fairly standard move. It is a bet that the structural trends identified so far extend beyond the original claim boundary, and that securing the ground now, before results from the soil sampling or CSAMT survey are public, is cheaper than trying to acquire it later if the data turns out to be encouraging. Whether that bet pays off will depend largely on what the Phase 2 program turns up over the coming months.
