Deep Faith Prospect, Fairbanks Mining District, Fairbanks North Star Borough, Alaska, USAi

Regional Level Types
Deep Faith Prospect	Prospect
Fairbanks Mining District	Mining District
Fairbanks North Star Borough	Borough
Alaska	State
USA	Country

Location: The location is the approximate center of the Deep Faith claim block. The claim block is located 75 road miles northeast of Fairbanks along the Steese Highway. The property is accessible via a short gravel road which is maintained by the State and local placer mine operators. The claim block consists of 64 state mining claims and 20 prospecting sites covering 5720 acres.
Geology: The following description is largely from Wold, 1998. The Deep Faith claim block lies within the Yukon-Tanana Crystalline terrane of interior Alaska. Regional strike of bedrock compositional layering in this area is easterly to northeasterly, and faults trend subparallel to this structural grain. Large-scale folding is represented by northeasterly- to easterly-trending broad open antiforms and associated synforms. Stratigraphy of the Deep Faith claim block area is represented by a series of upper proterozoic and lower Paleozoic sedimentary and metasedimentary rocks consisting of the lower Fairbanks pelitic schists, the graphitic schist of the Cleary Sequence, the quartzite and quartz mica schist of the upper Fairbanks schist, and phyllitic schists and quartzites of the 'grit and metagrit sequence' (Smith, 1987). Several intrusives occur within the claim block and are part of the Hope granite suite. This series of plutons is part of a larger belt of Upper Cretaceous and lower Tertiary plutons which extends from southwest of Fairbanks northeast into Yukon Territory. The earliest report of lode deposits described contact veins (Prindle, 1910). In 1926, a stibnite deposit was reported during the construction of a bedrock drain on Hope Creek (Joesting, 1943). Quartz veins containing small lenses and stringers of stibnite, explored by short tunnels in the 1920's off Sourdough Creek, contained over 27 percent Sb (Killeen and Mertie, 1951). Samples collected from dumps in 1966 contained 23 percent stibnite (Berg and Cobb, 1967). There are several other lode occurrences in the area. Hope Creek has an antimony-copper-lead-molybdenum-tungsten occurrence (Joesting, 1943). The Faith/Charity Creeks stratiform gold deposit was described by Smith and others (1987), who measured a 170 ft section along Charity Creek that contains anomalous gold (14 ppb), lead (720 ppm), arsenic (140 ppm), and silver (500 ppb). The deposit is composed mostly of gray laminated quartzite and graphitic schist. Select samples from veins in the graphitic schist contain 4800 ppb gold. Veins along Faith Creek contains pyrite, sphalerite, arsenopyrite, chalcopyrite and stibnite. The Hope Creek tin-silver occurrence is hosted in the Hope granite suite and there are wollastonite/pyroxene-bearing skarns within 100 ft of the contact with the pluton.
Workings: The state conducted an extensive geologic survey in the area during the mid-1980's and identified several potential lode deposits on the Faith Creek drainage.

Commodities (Major) - Au
Development Status: None
Deposit Model: Various polymetallic stratiform deposits in schist; also polymetallic veins and

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Link to USGS - Alaska:	CI015

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References