Most market attention has been on Gold Standard's continuing major drill-out at Dark Star, where the company has considerably extended the potential scale of a coming resource upgrade with its extensive drilling this year. The company's president and CEO Jonathan Awde said recently it still had about 100 drill-holes to complete in this year's 75,000-80,000m program.

Earlier-stage work at LT, 3km north-northwest of Pinion, has returned high-grade assays from several of the 70 surface outcrop rock samples collected over a wide area, where limited previous drilling gave some insight into the underling stratigraphy. Gold Standard says gold mineralization is hosted in decalcified, silicified and oxidized multilithic dissolution collapse breccia proximal to a north-striking igneous dike.

"This is the same stratigraphic horizon and style of alteration that hosts the nearby Pinion oxide gold deposit," the company reported this week.

"A geologic mapping program is currently underway to identify the extent of the altered multilithic breccia host and structural controls on the mineralization. This information will be used to develop a 2019 drilling program."

Gold Standard project geologist Robert Edie said plus-4gpt LT surface samples were indicative of a "strong hydrothermal system" and enough for him to declare LT part of an "ever-growing pipeline of early-stage exploration opportunities" within the company's 208sq.km Railroad land package.

Awde said LT offered more evidence of the "district scale of the Railroad-Pinion mineral system".

"This target is farther north and west than our exploration to date and we are seeing the same characteristics that have marked our discoveries at Dark Star, Jasperoid Wash and Dixie, but with better surface gold exposure," he said.

"I am impressed by our technical team's ability to apply our growing understanding of how this district was formed and mineralized to quickly qualify new opportunities.

"We believe that LT is not the last new target we will find this year."

Gold Standard shares (TSX: GSV/NYSE AMERICAN: GSV) are about 10% in the past week, and have risen by 56% since hitting a 2018 low of C$1.53 in June.

The company had a market value at yesterday's close of C$618 million.