Barrick then sat on the deposit for nearly two decades, citing a slump in the gold price to US$350 (Au$518.15) an ounce for its inaction. But it believed just 300,000 ounces were left in reserves and it was too small to pursue.

When Dateline finally convinced Barrick to relinquish the asset in 2021, it immediately set about redefining the resource, eventually bringing it up to a 2012 JORC standard of 813,000 ounces in 2022. Further drilling earlier this year subsequently improved the global resource estimate to 1.1 million ounces, of which 736,000 ounces is in the measured and indicated category grading 1.26g/t, with some of those ounces going at more than 3g/t as verified by today’s reported high-grade section of 8.17g/t.

The Colosseum mine sits at the southern end of the Sevier foreland thrust belt in the Southern Basin and Range province. The deposit is a hydrothermal breccia pipe with a combination of epithermal mineralisation at original higher levels and mesothermal mineralisation at the lower levels.

Unusually for a gold project, the Colosseum deposit sits next door to the Mountain Pass mine, owned by Nevada-based MP Materials, that is America’s only large-scale rare earths project and is renowned as one of the world’s highest-quality deposits.

Dateline notes that Colosseum and Mountain Pass appear to sit along the same dyke and could potentially share some of the same rare earths.

World-renowned rare earths geological father-and-son duo, Tony Mariano and Tony Mariano Jr, have since visited Dateline’s project and have reported that there are some encouraging signs of rare earths-bearing structures. However, they have also sought to dispel the theory that Colosseum is a Mountain Pass-lookalike.

Further work will be undertaken to test the geochemical fingerprint at some stage in the future.

With its saddle bags now full of cash and a raft of new data to sift through as it moves towards scoping the project, Dateline appears to have jagged a previously unloved project that has literally been gathering dust in a back room somewhere in the bowels of a Barrick basement for 20 years. With the gold price riding high at about AU$3700 an ounce, the company may have got its timing pitch-perfect to be able to blow the dust off a deposit that well deserves a second chance.

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