Sleeper Gold Project

Paramount Gold Nevada owns a 100% interest in the Sleeper Gold Project, a former high-grade open pit gold producer located off a main highway approximately 25 miles northwest of the town of Winnemucca, Nevada. The famed Sleeper mine was operated by AMAX Gold Inc. (“Amax”) from 1986 until 1996, producing 1.66 million ounces of gold and 2.3 million ounces of silver.

Paramount has assembled a district-scale project with significant unexplored gold potential. The project is 100% owned with a land position that includes staked and purchased lands of approximately 44,917 acres stretching south on trend to Newmont’s Sandman Project. 

Amax’s mining operation left a legacy of superb infrastructure in place including excellent accessibility by all-weather roads to and within the property; electrical power (from the Nevada State grid); and water (two operating, deep water wells are located on the property).

The Company is reporting a mineral resource estimate as prepared by QP, RESPEC Company LLC with an effective date of June 30, 2023.  To determine the estimate the following material assumptions and criteria were used:
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•    The Sleeper deposit has the potential to be mined by open pit methods.  The Mineral Resources were tabulated to reflect potential open pit mining and heap leach and bio-oxidation extraction as the primary scenario.  To meet the requirement of reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction, a pit optimization was run using the parameters summarized in following Table:

•    The pit shell created by the optimization was used to constrain the mineral resources, which are reported at a cut-off grade of 0.14 g Au/t for oxide and mixed materials, whereas the sulfide material is reported at a cut-off grade of 0.17 g Au/t and 0.14 g Au//t for dumps.  The gold cut-off grade was calculated using the processing, general and administrative costs, gold price, recovery, and refining cost,  provided in above Table.  The mining cost is not included in the determination of the cut-off grade, as all material in the conceptual pit would potentially be mined as either ore or waste.  The reference point at which the mineral resources are defined is therefore at the top rim of the pit, where material equal to or greater than the cut-off grade would be processed.
•    The metal prices used in the pit optimization and the determination of the gold cut-off grade and gold-equivalency factor are derived roughly from three-year moving-average prices as of August 2022 ($1,800/oz and $22/oz for gold and silver, respectively).
•    The open pit resource estimates are based on a 30,000 tonnes per day processing rate.The resources are constrained within an optimized pit, reflecting the potential for open pit mining and heap-leach processing of the oxidized materials. The cutoff for unoxidized materials reflects the potential for flotation with biooxidation processing.

In completing the Sleeper TRS, the Company undertook a comprehensive review of the project’s database which included over 4,000 drill holes dating back to the early 1980s from the time of the first discovery of mineralization to when the mine was closed in 1996.  Given the lack of digitization of the original drill hole database, the Company has, under the direction of QP RESPEC, engaged in digitizing and re-verifying the entire Sleeper database. 

​​​​​​​The completion of the data verification is expected to improve the confidence level applied to the resources and would allow for improved 3D modelling. Paramount will continue to advance the evaluation of Sleeper to update the Initial Assessment in 2023.

The Sleeper Gold Project is situated within the western part of the Northern Nevada Rift a geologic province of Miocene age that hosts several productive gold mining camps. The project is located along the western flank of the Slumbering Hills–a north trending mountain range bounded by faults.  Faults on the flank of the range are north-northeast trending and drop the Paleozoic stratigraphy exposed in the range and the Miocene volcanic rocks down into the Desert Valley.  These faults have accumulated down-throw of more than 1,000 meters and have focused hydrothermal gold-bearing fluids toward the surface.  One of these favourable north-northeast trending faults controls the location of the Sleeper Gold deposit.

Gold concentrations in the Sleeper Gold Project have been recognized in four distinct settings:
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• Early – quartz-pyrite-marcasite stockwork propagating into the wall-rock around structures.
• Intermediate – medium-grade, silica-pyrite-marcasite cemented breccia in pipe-like or irregular bodies.
• Late – high-grade, banded, quartz-adularia-electrum (sericite) in narrow to very wide discrete veins.
• Post – alluvial gold-silver deposits in Pliocene gravels, localized in paleo-channels in dominantly unconsolidated material.

Within the Sleeper Gold Project all of these gold occurrences have been identified, but the intermediate and late stage mineralization are the styles that were exploited historically and brought notoriety to this Northern Nevada Gold Camp. These main stage mineralizing events are interpreted as a high sulfidation system, intimately associated with Miocene intrusive rocks and generated from magmatic fluids emanating from that source.
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In the extensive land package associated with the Sleeper Gold Project, two of the key components for the discovery of additional high-grade vein systems have therefore been established.  These lands contain north-northeast trending faults to provide a trap for gold mineralization and Miocene igneous rocks, a source for gold-bearing fluids.  The mining district that contains the Sleeper Gold Project is constrained on the north end by the historical Sleeper mine and the extensive known resource and on the south end by Newmont’s Sandman deposit.  Between these deposits, the north-northeast trending faults and Miocene igneous rocks are our focus with systematic direct and indirect exploration to find concentrations of high-grade gold.