I think it might be useful to AUTocrats if i re-post comments i...

I think it might be useful to AUTocrats if i re-post comments i posted immediately after news released a week ago or so:

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AUT has a district scale land position in the most favorable part of the greenstone belt for a large gold system. So they have already positioned themselves well in one of the most favorable terranes for a big discovery. With historic production of 1 Moz there is no question as to the fertility of the Pickle Lake belt. There is the real potential in the Uchi domain to have several remaining deposits >5 Moz resources, and perhaps even >10 Moz. The Pickle Crow deposit has the "space" and the requisite grades to be one of these missing significant deposits.

But the only way to take the present Pickle Crow deposit (1 Moz production and 1Moz resources in narrow high-grade veins) and double the total deposit size to a 4-5 Moz deposit (or really push the envelope and see if it could be much bigger) is to take an aggressive exploration approach by drilling the known walk up targets along strike and simultaneously drill all of the major known veins to significant depths, particularly the veins around Shaft 3 and the Albany shaft that have been explored at shallower depths than Shaft 1. Orogenic gold deposits like Pickle Crow can have tremendous depth extents with little decrease in grade. The big "veins" in the Homestake deposit in the USA for example were mined for up to 7 km along plunge to a vertical depth of 2.44 km! Mineralization at Red Lake is similar, and is known over a vertical range of at least 2.6 km. All of the known veins at Pickle Crow could extend to much greater depths, but of course drilling from surface to these kinds of depths is intensive and consumes a lot of the budgeted "meterage".

It is always possible that some major high-tonnage lower-grade type of mineralization, say associated with the Timiskaming-type basin, or totally new major high-grade veins could be found within the footprint of the historic mine but the really game-changing increases in resources will only come from "going deep" or "stepping out". Infill drilling on the known veins above say 1 km depth will only ever shift the resource numbers around by several hundred thousand ounces, like we just saw with the latest resource update. It makes sense to expand the initial resource estimate with their maiden drilling campaign, but I really look forward to what is next.

These are still early days for AUT and I hope that a significant portion of the budgeted 45,000-m program will be slated more toward the "discovery" side and not the "resource definition" side so we really get a sense of what the true extent of mineralization might be and if AUT is onto one of the big missing deposits in the Uchi.