Dalaroo launches 9km-long West African gold soil sampling blitz

Dalaroo Metals has fired the starting gun on a large-scale soil geochemical sampling campaign at the Goldridge prospect within its Bondoukou gold project in north-eastern Côte d’Ivoire. 

The program aims to convert a 9 km-long prospective structural corridor, interpreted from aeromagnetic data and recent surface exploration, into a stack of drill-ready targets. 

The company has marked out a grid of 4400 soil samples across a 200-metre by 50-metre spacing that will blanket the northwest-southeast-trending structural corridor, a trend recognised as a key control on the country’s Birimian greenstone-belt gold systems. 

The program is designed to map the extent, continuity and intensity of gold mineralisation and to sniff out any parallel or blind structures along the trend. Dalaroo says its early progress has been solid, with field crews opening up 12.75 kilometres of sampling lines and collecting 262 samples in the first week.

The company interprets the soil sample material as lateritic clays and gravels containing abundant quartz fragments, along with iron oxide alteration including hematite, goethite and limonite, all of which can be handy pathfinder indicators for gold in tropical terrains. 

Notably, this is not simply a green-fields dart-throw. In March, Dalaroo reported that early rock-chip samples of quartz reef material from artisanal workings returned gold grades up to 17.95 grams per tonne(g/t) , with four of six samples coming in between 3.59g/t and 17.95g/t gold. 

The company chased up the initial work later in March with further mapping and sampling that defined a priority drill target corridor 2.5 kilometres long and up to 400m wide at surface. Notably, that target corridor sits within a much larger interpreted structural corridor stretching about 9.5 kilometres.

The follow-up reconnaissance included 56 rock and saprolite samples, from which eight samples delivered results greater than or equal to 0.5g/t gold and outlined a structurally controlled gold system associated with quartz veining and a favourable contact between metasedimentary and mafic volcanic rocks. 

Dalaroo Metals chief executive officer John Morgan said: “This program represents a significant step in unlocking the scale potential of the Bondoukou Project. The combination of a 9km structural corridor, strong artisanal activity and high-grade rock-chip results highlights the potential for a large, structurally controlled gold system.”

The new soil program is squarely aimed at extending the initial 2.5km-long Goldridge corridor along strike and tightening up the target picture so the company can move quickly into trenching, auger work and a maiden reverse circulation drill campaign. 

With thousands of assays expected to roll in over the coming months, Dalaroo is building what appears to be a healthy pipeline of targets at Bondoukou. 

If the soil chemistry lights up along that extensive structural trend, the company could soon be lining up the drills for a proper crack at a new West African gold discovery.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au