Freegold ventures advances Golden Summit: bulk-sampling project to yield geological information, gold.(SPECIAL SECTION: MINING ISSUE)

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Steadily falling snow in late September and a quiet equipment yard at the Golden Summit project didn't dampen Michael Gross' enthusiasm. He's the vice president of exploration for Freegold Ventures and a moving force behind the company's recent, rapid advancement of its Fairbanks-area gold property.

"There's so much more potential here than what I imagined when looking at the data a year-and-a-half ago," said Gross, during a tour of Golden Summit, a large claim block that has been explored by the Vancouver-based junior exploration company for nearly 20 years. "It has amazed all of us--how widespread the gold mineralization is ... much more than what we thought last fall."

Despite a long history of working Golden Summit, sometimes with partners and sometimes going it alone, Freegold has changed the focus and mode of work recently, thanks to new corporate management with a different view of the property.

Gross and Steve Manz, named president of Golden Summit about two years ago, are part of the new plan for the Fairbanks-area property, as well as Freegold's other properties in Alaska and a well-defined gold project in Nevada.

At Golden Summit, the focus is still on exploration, but with a twist to the traditional methods of drilling diamond core or reverse circulation holes and plugging the data into a geological model.

The company is using a smaller-sized drill rig, a rotary air blast unit, to complete shallow, closely spaced drilling sections, called fences--work designed to identify and trace high-grade gold zones for bulk sampling.