Terrain Minerals plans to test its promising Wildflower gold project in Western Australia later this month, with an air-core (AC) drill program for 41 holes comprising about 2100m.

Drilling will test the company’s two priority targets within its Wildflower project – Wildflower and Cota – with management keen to follow-up on historical drilling and soil sampling that produced encouraging results at the project, which sits within WA’s Murchison gold province. Terrain says it will undertake its first AC drill program at the Wildflower project to pursue gold prospectivity at its two target areas.

The Wildflower project is considered to represent the southern extension of the company’s Smokebush project and sits south of Warriedar Resources’ Ricciardo gold deposit. It also is in proximity to Red 5’s high-grade underground Rothsay gold mine.

The first target, aptly named Wildflower, has an extensive 1000m-by-500m gold-in-soil surface anomaly that returned a peak value of 246 parts per billion gold.

Historic rotary air blast (RAB) drilling conducted within the anomalous zone returned 15m at 1.49 grams per tonne gold from 10m. The only reverse-circulation (RC) hole drilled at the project produced 5m going 1.03g/t gold from 100m.

Management noted most of the previous holes drilled in the target zone were to a shallow depth of about 5m and did not fully test the potential of the Wildflower target. It says the drilling results appear consistent with the grade and thickness of the nearby Ricciardo gold deposit and that preliminary field mapping shows the gold anomalism at Wildflower follows a similar north-east trend to that observed at Warriedar’s suite of gold deposits.

The Cota target, previously known as T16W, is a big co-incident gold-arsenic anomaly that remains untested by previous drilling. The company believes it warrants a maiden 900m AC program due to field observations and mapping completed at the target.

Terrain’s exploration team will soon begin constructing access tracks and drill pads to be ready for drilling later this month. Positive feedback has been received from the company’s preferred laboratory that turnaround time for gold-only assays is down to about three weeks, presenting a speedy timeframe for results.

The benefit of such a quick turnaround is that management is keen to tackle its promising Monza and Lightning prospects within Smokebush. However, it will wait to pursue its RC drill campaign until after results are known from the Wildflower assays.