The Claw 4 West occurrence is located 2.7 kilometres west of Moosehorn Lake and about 255 kilometres northwest of the community of Germansen Landing.

The occurrence area is situated within a Mesozoic volcanic arc assemblage which lies along the eastern margin of the Intermontane Belt, a northwest-trending belt of Paleozoic to Paleogene sediments, volcanics and intrusions bounded to the east by the Omineca Belt and to the west and southwest by the Sustut and Bowser basins.

Permian Asitka Group crystalline limestones are the oldest rocks exposed in the region. They are commonly in thrust contact with Upper Triassic Stuhini Group andesite flows and pyroclastic rocks. Stuhini volcanics have been intruded by the granodiorite to quartz monzonite Black Lake Suite of Lower Jurassic age and are in turn unconformably overlain by or faulted against Lower Jurassic calc-alkaline volcanics of the Toodoggone Formation, Hazelton Group.

The dominant structures in the area are steeply dipping faults which define a prominent regional northwest structural fabric trending 140 to 170 degrees. In turn, high angle, northeast-striking faults (approximately 060 degrees) appear to truncate and displace northwest-striking faults. Collectively these faults form a boundary for variably rotated and tilted blocks underlain by monoclinal strata.

Locally, a 15 by 15 metre outcrop of gossanous, oxidized (iron-oxide and malachite) skarn hosting several discontinuous lenses and masses of semi-massive to massive chalcopyrite and pyrite within quartz, including proximal fine-grained disseminations of chalcopyrite and pyrite are reported associated with a greater than 100 metre thick unit of Stuhini or Asitka Group limestone and a medium grained hornblende-biotite-magnetite bearing granodiorite to quartz monzonite containing hematite and quartz-carbonate veinlets with trace chalcopyrite. Another zone of skarn mineralization has been identified approximately 400 metres to the north west of the first zone.

Another zone of mineralization, referred to as the BG zone, is located to the west of the skarn mineralization and comprises a mineralized zone in variably propylitic altered volcanic rocks, that has been traced for approximately 100 metres along strike, containing quartz(?) and/or barite veins with variable amounts of galena, chalcopyrite and pyrite.

Work History

In 2004, Stealth Minerals Ltd collected several samples from the western area of the Claw 4 claim. A quartz vein sample with chalcopyrite assayed greater than 1 per cent copper, 5.69 grams per tonne gold and 9.1 grams per tonne silver (Assessment Report 27635).

In 2017 and 2018, Evergold Corp. completed programs of prospecting, geochemical (soil and rock) sampling and an airborne geophysical survey on the area as the Golden Lion property. The skarn occurrence was discovered in 2018. In 2018, nine rock samples of mineralized skarn from two zones, located approximately 400 metres apart, yielded from 1.345 to 13.5 per cent copper, 0.146 to 2.47 grams per tonne gold and 2.7 to 158 grams per tonne silver, while samples of volcanic rocks from the BG zone yielded up to 2.59 per cent copper, 47.9 grams per tonne silver and 0.124 gram per tonne gold (Tupper, D.W. (2019-08-12): NI 43-101 Technical Report on the Golden Lion Property).

The area has been historically explored in conjunction with the nearby Golden Lion (MINFILE 094E 077) and Har (MINFILE 094E 053) occurrences and a completed regional exploration history can be found there.