One of Canada's Highest-Grade Silver Mines Was Only a Branch. We Think the Trunk Is Untouched.

The Walton Mine opened as a pit in 1941, digging barite. That's a heavy industrial mineral used in oil drilling, and for years this was one of the biggest barite producers in Canada.¹

Then in 1955 a drill hole found something underneath it.¹

Massive sulphide. Lead, zinc, copper and silver, sitting in a shattered zone below the barite. Underground development soon followed, and base metal production started in 1961.¹

Mill feed produced from ore that delivered between 350 and 933 grams of silver per tonne.¹

Individual holes ran far higher. DDH 174 cut 5,754 grams of silver per tonne and 0.6% copper over 12.8 metres. DDH 210 ran 1,233 grams over 24.1 metres.⁴

Read those numbers again. Especially the first one.

Then read this. Remember, they're historic, they predate modern reporting standards, no Qualified Person has verified them, and the core from DDH 174 no longer exists to re-sample.⁴

But in 1970 the underground began to take on water. Too much barite had been taken out and too little left to hold the ground up, so the workings progressively collapsed in on themselves. The fractures that opened let salty, sandy water in from the surrounding sediments and flooding began.¹

The mine kept going as it progressively flooded, stripping high-grade barite and sulphides until 1978, then stopped with the removal of the crown pillars.¹⁵

Those workings sit on licences held by other companies, north and west of us.⁵

Here's where we came in: we care about the rock unit they were cut into. And we want to see if we can find samples that come in the same league as those historic “wow” numbers.

That's the question this project starts from, and it's the reason there's a drill program at all.

Here's something many non-geologists might not already understand. The metal at Walton didn't begin where it was mined.³

Metal-bearing brine rises out of the deep basin along faults. It finds a bed of limestone it can chemically replace. Then it drops its load where the pH conditions change.³

So the plumbing matters just as much as the rock, if not more. There's a structure the fluid came up, and there are the places it spread out sideways once it got there.³

The carbonate replacement deposit classification is analogous to “Irish-Type”, after the belt in Ireland that hosts them.³

That isn't a stylistic comparison. Before the Atlantic opened, this ground and that ground were the same ground.³

A mine works whatever reaches surface. It doesn't get to choose.

Think of it like a tree.

Our reading is that Walton's operations worked one of the tree's branches. High in the system, and lucky enough to break surface where somebody could dig it in 1941.

Then the modern work started pointing somewhere else.

The surveys we ran in 2021 and 2024 found a large, dense anomaly at depth, southwest of the old workings.⁵

And the 2023 drill hole told us why the geometry is strange. This whole package has been folded and tipped over. That's what puts the deep part where it now sits, and why the rock sequence reads backwards in core.⁶

The trunk?

Put those together and you have the hypothesis this company was built to test.

Walton may have been a higher-level branch that happened to reach surface, with the trunk that fed it sitting deeper and to the southwest.

And as of now, no drill has ever been in it at depth.⁵

The academic economic geology view on this target is blunt: it has to be drilled.There's exactly one instrument that settles the rest.⁶

That's what the drill is for. To prove our theory correct.

The Walton sulphides sat in a bed called the Macumber Formation. It's the horizon that does the work in this kind of deposit, and it runs onto our ground.⁶³

And in 2023 we drilled that same formation.

Hole ST-23-01 went 557 metres down and cut two mineralized zones.²

The deeper one ran 110 grams per tonne silver equivalent over 5.1 metres of true width, copper included. The shallower ran 150 grams equivalent over 0.6 metres. Both sat inside a twenty metre envelope of strongly sideritized rock.⁶

The hole did what it was drilled to do. It proved the structural model.⁶

Same rock. Same style. Our side of the line.

Jim Michaelis has been working this system for 45 years. His father-in-law worked underground at Walton.²

He came up as a project geologist with Gulf Minerals and then Billiton, and he built the 3D structural model this project is aimed at.²

That model said the whole package had been folded and tipped over.⁶

Which is an awkward thing to claim out loud. It means the rock reads backwards, and the target repeats where nobody would think to look.

ST-23-01 drilled through exactly that.

The sequence came up reversed. The hole crossed the Macumber twice. And between the two cuts, the core carries the fold itself.⁶

The model predicted upside-down rock. The drill found upside-down rock.

That year the Nova Scotia Department of Mines published its assessment of what Walton had produced. Its conclusion was that the high per unit value of the average ore, mainly due to the significant silver content, justifies exploration.⁴

Then the ground sat for the better part of three decades.

We're not the only ones interested now, either. Dr. Murray Hitzman of iCRAG, the Irish research centre where this deposit type is studied, has said that Nova Scotia has exactly Irish Type Deposits.⁶

He was talking about the province, not about our licences. But the Irish deposits are where the model we're drilling was worked out, and the comparison is one our own presentation already draws.

So we did the work to be able to drill it.

The Walton underground bottomed out at 500 metres. Then the ground gave way, the water came in, and in 1970 that was the beginning of the end of the argument.⁵

The holes we've permitted are planned to around 650 metres.⁵

Set those two beside each other.

What stopped a mine in 1970 isn't what stops our drill in 2026. And if we ever get to build our own mine, it won't be constructed in the same unsafe way as Walton was.

Walton's production came from ore that yielded 350 to 933 grams of silver per tonne.¹

In some Irish-type systems, silver and copper grades do increase closer to the feeder structure. That's been documented at Lisheen and at Silvermines.⁷

So the arithmetic in your head says a trunk would beat the branch.

We're not going to run that number. But we also won't stop you, if that's what you want to do with that information.

A feeder position tells you about plumbing. Where the fluid moved, where it had room to drop its load.

It doesn't tell you grade.

A gravity survey measures how heavy the rock is. Heavy rock at depth can be silver-bearing sulphide, or it can be barite or it can be iron with manganese.

So here's the narrower claim, and we can defend every word of it.

The structural position is right. The host formation is right. Our own hole found the right style of mineralization on the way toward it.

And nobody has ever put a drill in the thing itself. We aim to change that.

Fresnillo. San Dimas. Cannington. Keno Hill. In every one, the discovery came after somebody re-read the geology. Not after somebody reopened the mine.⁶

• Fresnillo, Mexico.

  Centuries of shallow vein mining. A district-scale structural reinterpretation from 1990 to 1993. Blind high-grade silver veins found outside the historic workings between 1994 and 1999.⁶

• San Dimas, Mexico.

  Around three hundred years of underground mining. Deep targeting and structural reinterpretation across 2016 and 2017. New deep and blind vein discoveries from 2017 to 2019.⁶

• Cannington, Australia.

  A regional brownfield district with no historic mine at the discovery site. Modern geophysics under cover from 1990 to 1992. A blind silver-lead-zinc system found in 1993.⁶

• Keno Hill, Yukon.

  Mined from 1913 to 1989, then the camp closed. A camp-scale reinterpretation by Alexco from 2006 to 2009. New high-grade veins found outside the old stopes between 2009 and 2013, and Hecla acquired Alexco in 2022.⁶

One word repeats in every row. Blind.

A blind deposit leaves nothing at surface to find, which is why nobody finds one by walking the ground.

That's the category we're drilling into, and it's what the pattern looks like when somebody makes one of these.

These are comparables, not forecasts. None of them says anything about what sits under our licences.

Every exploration story at this stage is a hypothesis with a test attached. Here's what sits behind ours.

Somebody drilled thirty-eight shallow holes in the Sturgis area in the late 1960s, then walked away.²

We tracked down the logs and digitised them. Two of those holes hit mineralization.²

Then our own seven years of activity. Drilling in 2019 and 2020, an airborne magnetic survey in 2021, the hole that worked in 2023, and gravity and AMT in 2024.⁶

Then the refined model, and the permits.⁵

We own it outright. One hundred percent, seventy claims, three licences, free and clear of any royalty.²

It's already permitted, not just applied for. That permit runs to March 2028 and covers drilling at three locations.⁵

The province's own geologists said this ore justified exploration, and the academic view is that the target has to be drilled.⁴⁶

The model has already been right once, under a drill.