Aurora – Canada

A Well-Endowed IRGS System in the Heart of the Tintina Gold Belt

The Aurora Gold Project is T2 Metals’ most recently acquired Yukon asset, representing a significant and largely untested gold-silver system within the western Tintina Gold Belt. Acquired through an Option Agreement with Yukon exploration veteran Shawn Ryan and Wildwood Exploration Inc., Aurora brings together a substantial 76 km² land position, a well-characterised intrusive centre, and a suite of high-grade historical drill intersections that have never been systematically followed up with modern IRGS exploration methods.

The project lies 70 km northeast of Dawson City with direct access via the Dempster Highway — one of the best-serviced exploration corridors in the Yukon — and only 10 km east of Prospector Metals Corp’s ML Project, where drilling in 2025 delivered one of the most significant new IRGS discoveries in the belt in recent years.

Highlights

• 76 km² land position centred on the Antimony Mountain Stock, a mid-Cretaceous Tombstone Plutonic Suite intrusion with all the hallmarks of a fertile IRGS system.
• Six significant gold-bearing prospects defined by past explorers over a 10 km trend, including high-grade vein, skarn, disseminated sulphide, and bulk-tonnage porphyry-style targets — an unusually diverse suite of mineralisation styles for a single project.
• Fewer than 3,000 m of drilling across the entire project, with no work undertaken for over 15 years. Aurora is a genuinely underexplored system by any measure.
• Exceptional access: 2 km from the Dempster Highway at its nearest point, with established infrastructure and services available from nearby Dawson City.
• Optioned from Shawn Ryan, the prospector credited with sparking a second Klondike gold rush through systematic exploration innovations that led to the Golden Saddle, Arc, and Coffee discoveries — the last of which was acquired by Goldcorp for $520 million.

Location and Access

Aurora is located in the Dawson Mining District of the Yukon Territory, 70 km northeast of Dawson City. The project is accessible directly from the Dempster Highway — a fully serviced all-weather road — placing it among the most logistically straightforward exploration projects in the territory. The Dempster corridor has supported active exploration and development for decades and provides ready access to experienced contractors, aviation services, and the full range of infrastructure required for systematic exploration through to drilling.

The project lies within the traditional territory of the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation, a self-governing First Nation that has settled its land claim — providing a clear and stable framework for exploration and development engagement.

Geology and Mineralization

Aurora lies near the western margin of the Selwyn Basin, where Late Proterozoic to Lower Cambrian clastic metasediments of the Hyland Group — interbedded shales, quartzites, and coarse sandstones — are transitionally overlain by calcareous greywackes and limestones of the Road River Group. This stratigraphy, rich in the carbonaceous and calcareous horizons that act as chemical and mechanical traps for hydrothermal gold, is the same host package that underlies many of the significant IRGS deposits in the Tombstone Belt.

The central feature of the project is the Antimony Mountain Stock (AMS) — an elongate 7 x 3.5 km body of hornblende syenite to quartz monzonite emplaced at approximately 93–91 Ma as part of the Tombstone Plutonic Suite. The stock exhibits a porphyritic texture with alkali feldspar phenocrysts and a finer-grained diorite margin phase. Critically, the northern portion of the stock is essentially non-magnetic, consistent with a reduced oxidation state — a key characteristic of fertile IRGS intrusions and a strong indicator that the AMS generated the low-sulphidation, gold-transporting fluids diagnostic of this deposit style. The southern portion of the stock is comparatively more magnetic, suggesting multiple intrusive pulses and a more complex thermal history than previously recognised.

Aurora is structurally positioned between the Tintina Fault to the south and the Dawson Thrust to the north, with the Robert Service Thrust on the western property boundary. This regional fault network — the same architecture that channelled hydrothermal fluids into the intrusion-adjacent host rocks at ML, AurMac, and other major Tombstone Belt deposits — has created the structural plumbing for gold-bearing fluid migration across the Aurora tenure.

The Antimony Mountain Stock is fringed by a well-developed hornfels aureole extending up to 1 km from the stock margins, where sedimentary rocks are intensely silicified and carry finely disseminated pyrrhotite and pyrite — producing the prominent iron oxide-stained rusty ridges characteristic of reduced IRGS systems. Where the intrusion contacts calcareous sediments, skarn and calc-silicate replacement alteration (diopside-epidote-actinolite) is locally developed, opening the possibility of gold-bearing skarn mineralisation in addition to the known vein systems.

Six distinct prospect areas have been defined over a 10 km north-south trend. High-grade quartz-arsenopyrite-tourmaline veins are mapped in fault-controlled east-trending orientations. The AJ Vein, the most thoroughly tested of these, has been traced over 700 m along strike and returned some of the highest gold grades in the district from only superficial drilling. The Golden Wall Prospect — a 400 m cliff face showing disseminated sulphides and iron oxide over a large exposed surface, with up to 61 g/t Au in outcrop — remains essentially undrilled and represents one of the highest-priority targets on the project for bulk-tonnage stratabound mineralisation. Other defined showings — JC, Rainbow, TK, and TT — add further target diversity across the tenement.

The geochemical signature at Aurora is consistent with the diagnostic IRGS pathfinder suite: Au-As-Sb-Bi association in soil and rock samples, with silver-lead-zinc enrichment at the outer margins of the system where hydrothermal temperatures were lower. The stibnite veins discovered as far back as 1916 — which gave the area its original name, Antimony Mountain — are now understood as the distal, lower-temperature expression of the same magmatic-hydrothermal system that generated gold mineralisation at the intrusive core.

Exploration History

Exploration at Aurora spans more than a century, beginning with the discovery of stibnite veins in 1916. Significant programs have been conducted by Conwest Exploration (1966–1967), Anaconda Canada (1979–1980), Total Energold (1988–1989), and Kennecott (1994–1998), with more recent work by Logan Resources and Golden Predator (2005–2011). Together these programs have established the presence of gold mineralisation across multiple prospect areas — but no systematic program has applied modern IRGS exploration methods to the project, and the bulk of the tenement remains drill-untested.

The most significant historical drilling was conducted by Golden Predator in 2009 at the AJ Prospect: 12 holes for 881 m returned multiple high-grade intersections including 4.9 m @ 12.45 g/t Au, 3.4 m @ 24.45 g/t Au, and 3.2 m @ 25.06 g/t Au. These results were never followed up. Kennecott’s regional sampling returned 69.0 g/t Au from Toby Creek vein outcrop, while Conwest drilling — the earliest systematic program — returned 28.5 g/t Au over 2.74 m, demonstrating that high-grade gold has been consistently encountered across the project wherever systematic work has been done.

Exploration Program

T2 Metals is integrating all historical geophysical and geochemical datasets to build a modern targeting framework for Aurora, informed by the structural and geochemical models validated at ML. Priority targets for the initial field program include the Golden Wall Prospect — the largest undrilled anomaly on the property — along with systematic expansion of the known AJ Vein mineralisation and first-pass testing of the untested soil anomalies that define the project’s 10 km mineralised trend. Geophysical surveys will be used to map the full extent of the Antimony Mountain Stock and its alteration aureole, identify structural controls on gold mineralisation, and distinguish between covered bedrock and surficial cover. Phase 1 diamond drilling will test the highest-priority targets, designed to answer the key question that more than a century of surface exploration has left open: the scale of the gold system at depth.