Exploration company Gateway Mining has made a significant breakthrough at its flagship Yandal gold project in Western Australia, with early drilling results pointing to a substantial new gold system.
Major Discovery at Mustang Prospect
The promising results come from a major 44,000-metre aircore drilling campaign focused on the Mustang prospect. Initial reconnaissance drilling across wide-spaced lines has identified multiple zones with anomalous gold readings. These zones are associated with favourable structural settings around three key intrusive targets, which the company has named Colt, Pony, and Haflinger.
According to Gateway, the findings suggest Mustang could host an extensive mineralised system with significant scale potential. The results have already generated several high-priority targets for follow-up drilling.
The Standout Colt Target
The most compelling feature to emerge is the newly defined Colt target. This zone extends for at least 1.4 kilometres along strike and is up to 600 metres wide. Critically, the mineralisation remains open both along strike and at depth, indicating considerable potential for expansion as drilling continues.
Gateway believes the gold mineralisation is likely linked to large-scale structural flexures developed around a series of intrusions. The target zones feature stacked mineralised gold lodes along shared contacts between intermediate volcanics, mafic volcanic units, and intrusive margins. This geological setting is known to host high-grade gold deposits elsewhere in the prolific Yandal belt.
Strategic Location in a Prolific Belt
The Yandal project holds a strategic position, located 85 kilometres northeast of Wiluna and covering a vast 1,780 square kilometres on the eastern flank of the world-class Yandal Greenstone Belt. This region is one of Australia's most productive gold areas and is home to Northern Star Resources' giant 6.4 million-ounce Jundee mine, which sits close to Gateway's tenure.
The success of Jundee, a cornerstone operation since 1995, has long highlighted the prospectivity of the Yandal belt for Archaean, high-grade, narrow-vein lode-style deposits.
Gateway's broader Yandal project already hosts a substantial resource base of 8.17 million tonnes at 1.52 grams per tonne gold for 400,400 ounces. This resource is centred on the Horse Well Gold Camp and the Dusk 'til Dawn deposit, providing a solid foundation for the company's ongoing exploration efforts.
Next Steps and Exploration Potential
At Mustang, anomalous gold has also been intersected along a key mafic-intermediate contact, mirroring high-grade mineralisation found elsewhere on the project. This contact is now a prime target for follow-up reverse circulation (RC) and infill drilling. Gateway has scheduled these programs to restart in late February 2025.
Gateway Mining executive chairman Andrew Bray stated that the initial results from the first three aircore lines indicate the emergence of an extensive system at Mustang, as the company had anticipated. "Multiple mineralised structures are beginning to be identified across these wide-spaced reconnaissance lines, representing strong follow-up targets for RC drilling in the new year," Bray said.
The Mustang prospect is noted for its structural complexity, particularly where the Celia Shear and Mustang Shear corridors intersect and flex around the Pony, Haflinger, and Colt intrusions. Northeast-trending cross structures further enhance this complexity, creating dilational zones considered highly prospective for gold deposition.
Historical drilling in the area, largely conducted by Eagle Mining in the mid-1990s, was shallow and wide-spaced, failing to penetrate the transported cover. Consequently, the underlying primary mineralised structures were never properly tested.
Gateway's current campaign represents the first systematic attempt to drill through this cover and test the basement geology along the Mustang-Pony corridor. With extensive strike potential and minimal modern exploration, the area presents a compelling opportunity for new discoveries.
Following recent capital raisings, Gateway is financially well-positioned to accelerate exploration across its underexplored Yandal portfolio. This push could deliver meaningful resource growth, a development likely to attract significant attention from investors in the Australian mining sector.
