Golden Cross/AUX

Canadian mineral exploration company Golden Cross Resources Inc. is preparing for a drilling campaign starting in June at its Reedy Creek high-grade gold project in Victoria, Australia.

The project is just about 10 kilometers northeast of and contiguous to Southern Cross Gold's Sunday Creek high-grade gold-antimony discovery.

Golden Cross Vice President Exploration Alan Till told Streetwise Reports that it is "an exciting time" for gold exploration in central Victoria.

"Over the past few years, the Victorian gold resurgence has been attracting many fresh and talented geologists, bring with them modern exploration techniques," Till said. "A rising tide floats all boats, and the achievements of companies like Southern Cross encourages the development of the local economy and establishment of ancillary service providers in the local area."

Another indicator of the project's promise was found through Lidar survey work, which identified more than 1,350 artisanal gold workings there dating back to the 1800s, he said. Till said the Lidar results enable him to assess targets at a high level of detail before even setting foot on the site.

"The sheer number of artisanal gold workings across our tenements is phenomenal," he said. "To me they really illustrate the upside potential of this project."

Great Pacific Gold Corp. owns almost 7% of the company after spinning it out to focus more on its holdings in Papua New Guinea. The company was started by the founders of K92 Mining Inc., which operates the high-grade and producing Kainantu Gold Mine there.

"We started a process about five months ago of divesting of our Australian assets," said Great Pacific Chief Executive Officer and Director Greg McCunn. " And Reedy Creek and the formation of Golden Cross was the first divestiture that we made."

The divestiture was strategic, McCunn said. "It's not because we don't like these assets," he said. "Our whole focus in this divestiture process has been try and find good operators who are going to bring value to these assets in Australia and try and retain an upside in them in form of shareholding, but also try and bring some cash into the GPAC treasury so that we can have non-diluted financing to go do what we need to do in PNG for our shareholders."

A 'Very Attractive Jurisdiction' 

Reedy Creek is located just 10 kilometers northeast of Sunday Creek, and historical drilling has already pointed to the potential for a high-grade gold system with significant intercepts of 2 meters at 174.4 grams per tonne gold (g/t Au) and 11 meters at 31.4 g/t Au.

"These shallow intercepts demonstrate very high gold grades but were never followed up with deeper or systematic drilling," the company said in a release. "Golden Cross intends to apply modern structural, geochemical, and geological tools to define its scale and continuity."

McCunn said that's one of the projects biggest benefits is its geology.

"There's a long history of gold production and high-grade gold deposits in this area," he said. "Historical mining on Reedy Creek was underground in the old days, back in the early 1900s, over 50 g/t.  There's plenty of history here to build on, and it's only recently that modern exploration has started to do work on this. It's a real hot area, a real hot belt, and it's ripe for success."

Golden Cross Chief Executive Officer and Director Matt Roma told Streetwise Reports that the area in central Victoria is "a very attractive jurisdiction."

Reedy Creek borders "one of, if not the largest and most attractive gold exploration properties in the world, in Southern Cross," Roma said. "From the day we kind of inked this project to acquire it, that project (Southern Cross's Sunday Creek) has got and even more attractive. It's essentially doubled in market cap."

The project is also only 90 minutes north of Melbourne, Australia, with drilling costs of about CA$230 per meter. Roma said drill costs in the Yukon can be more than CA$800 per meter.

With the area's weather and excellent infrastructure, Golden Cross can also drill year-round, a fact Roma said was "very attractive."

"Canada is a great place to mine and to work and to explore but permitting in Canada takes upwards of 10 years to put a mine into production," he said. "Whereas in Australia, in Victoria, it can be as little as three or four years."

McCunn said there was a "very high probability of successful holes to be drilled here" at Reedy Creek. "There's a lot of groundwork to be done, exploring new areas that we haven't drilled," he said.

'We Like Our Chances'

Golden Cross said a recently outlined gold-in-soil anomaly stretching more than 3 kilometers in length and running parallel to a regional anticline-similar in style to structures hosting mineralization at Sunday Creek is supporting the drilling campaign.

Gold-in-soil anomalies are critical early indicators of mineralized systems, especially in epizonal deposits where gold is often closely associated with fault zones and vein swarms near surface, the company said.

The anomaly identified at Reedy Creek aligns with mapped folding and structural complexity, suggesting the potential for multiple pathways for gold, Golden Cross said.

"In epizonal gold systems like those found in this region of Victoria, gold-in-soil anomalies often sit directly above ladder-style vein systems," Till said. "The scale and strength of the anomaly at Reedy Creek gives us confidence we're targeting the right structures."

Golden Cross said it was adopting the same exploration model used at Sunday Creek: "testing the ladder," which focuses on identifying stacked, steeply dripping high-grade gold bearing quartz veins (the "rungs" of a ladder) that can deliver multiple intercepts from a single hole when drilled at depth. The company said shorter historical holes from past campaigns would have missed these deeper intersections.

The fully funded 6,000-meter Phase 1 diamond drill program will start in June, the company said, beginning with 2,000 meters at the Prince of Wales and Wieneroider Ridge targets.

Roma said the company has "endless amounts" of targets to look at.

"So, our geology team is going to put a lot of shots on goal, and we like our chances," he said.

The Catalyst: Experts Still See Bull Market

It's a good year to be exploring for the yellow metal, as its price has set multiple high marks and, according to many experts, continues to be in a bull market.

According to Neils Christensen, writing Tuesday for FX Empire, gold continued to hold solid support above US$3,200 an ounce and "could see further upside momentum as weak inflation data gives the Federal Reserve room to cut interest rates to support the faltering U.S. economy."

The gold market saw modest buying momentum in its initial reaction to the latest inflation data. Although analysts do not expect the data to push the Federal Reserve out of its current neutral stance, some economists say it gives the central bank room to act if economic data continues to weaken.

Vicky McKeever reported for Yahoo! Finance that gold had recovered some ground Tuesday.

"Prices for the precious metal slumped on Monday, after it was announced that the U.S. and China had agreed to temporarily cut tariffs on each other's imports, marking a de-escalation in recent trade tensions," McKeever wrote.

According to a Reuters report, she wrote, KCM Trade chief market analyst Tim Waterer said there had been "some value-buying happening on gold at current levels which is helping to prop up the price, despite the generally better outlook for global growth with the US and China on better terms. … The consolidation move in the dollar has allowed the gold price to make a mild push higher."

Other experts are predicting gold could go higher. Garth Friesen wrote for Forbes on March 15 that DoubleLine Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Gundlach said, "I think gold will make it to US$4,000. I'm not sure that'll happen this year, but I feel like that's the measured move anticipated by the long consolidation at around US$1,800 on gold."

And according to an April 10 post on Goldfix, Goldman Sachs has revised raised the upper boundary of its forecast range for the end of the year to US$3,520 an ounce and even introduced a "tall-risk scenario" as high as US$4,500 an ounce.

Ownership and Share Structure

According to Refinitiv, about 1.75% of the company is owned by insiders and management, and the rest is retail.

Top investors include Roma with 1.42% and Director Darryl Cardey with 0.33%.

Its market cap is CA$20.52 million with 60.36 million shares outstanding. It trades in a 52-week range of CA$0.05 - $CA0.42.