The Viking Horde showing, a part of the Deer claims, is located on a ridge separating Little Cayuse and Deer creeks, approximately 29 kilometres northwest of Castlegar. In 2006, prospector T. Kennedy discovered a series of old workings, of unknown age, occurring in a zone of massive sulphides. The property was subsequently acquired by Kootenay Gold Inc. and worked as a part of their Deer Park property. A complete work history can be found in Assessment Report 31977.
Regionally, the area is underlain by Paleozoic metasedimentary and metavolcanic rocks that are intruded by granites and granodiorite that are tentatively assigned to the Middle Jurassic Nelson plutonic suite, and by syenites and monzonites of the Eocene Coryell intrusive suite. The age of the metasedimentary succession is uncertain. They may be part of the Carboniferous to Permian Mount Roberts Formation, basement to Triassic and Jurassic are volcanics in the Quesnel Terrane. Regionally, the property is bounded by extensional faults, to the east, the northerly trending Valkyr shear zone and to the west the Kettle River fault. These structures typically separate higher grade metamorphic ‘core complex’ rocks form overlying less deformed rocks.
Locally, zones of broken milled breccias trending generally steeply to the northeast or northwest. Calcite and chlorite as veinlets to matrix fill is common along with variable amounts of pyrite and limonite. Breccia fragments are generally bleached and albitic. Narrow discretely developed sugary quartz vein lets are developed in areas of more intense carbonate and argillic alteration.
Two styles of mineralization are noted to occur on the property. The first, consists of massive sulphides as stringers and replacements and the second, is sulphides in quartz veins.
The massive sulphides are composed of pyrrhotite and pyrite with minor chalcopyrite as discrete fractures and clots within the mafic volcanics and coarse gabbro-diorite units. A series of old workings are located along a zone of massive pyrrhotite and pyrite with some chalcopyrite and sphalerite hosted within a sediment sequence along the contact of the granodiorite stock. This zone is up to 5 metres in width.
The mineralized quartz veins contain pyrite and pyrrhotite with minor chalcopyrite. The quartz veins are milky to crystalline in texture with quartz crystal vugs common. Chlorite and sericite occur as clots and ribbons within the veining along with some calcite. These veins ranged from a few centimetres to 0.5 metres in width and were found cutting both the volcano-sedimentary package and the granodiorite stock. Wall-rock alteration consisted mainly of weak bleaching and sericite/pyrite flooding along with some shearing.
In 2009, trenching revealed both narrow high- grade quartz veinlets, returning up to16.05 grams per tonne gold and 5843.9 parts per million copper, and somewhat broader low- grade copper and gold zones within sulphidized metasediments. These returned values of 0.404 grams per tonne gold and 365 parts per million copper over 3.75 metres (Assessment Report 31496).
In 2010, drilling returned values of 20.7 parts per billion gold and 371 parts per million copper over 15.47 metres. A soil anomaly, 100 metres to the south, of the main showing was also drill tested. The hole cut a section of intermediate tuffaceous volcanics intruded by Eocene Coryell syenite dikes or sills and returned 411.3 parts per billion gold and 1839 part per million copper over 0.56 metres (Assessment Report 31977).
