Three instruments
Three instruments, three questions.
Most juniors put the anomaly map on the screen and let you fill in the rest. We'd rather walk you through what each instrument actually measures, because the differences between them are the whole argument.
Magnetics asks how magnetic the rock is.
In 2021 we flew a magnetic survey over the property with a drone, low enough to hold detail a fixed-wing survey smears.1
What came back sharpened the structure. Where the beds bend. Where the faults run.
Gravity asks how heavy it is.
In late 2024 we walked the property with a gravimeter and measured how hard the rock underneath pulls.1
That's the survey that found it. We call it the Sturgis target, and it sits 1.4 kilometres south-southwest of the Walton Mine.1
AMT asks how well it carries a current.
That matters because metal conducts electricity and most rock doesn't. Ground that carries a current is worth a second look.
In 2024, an AMT (Audio-MagnetoTelluric) survey read the same ground for how well it conducts electricity.1
The three datasets are coincident. They outline one precise target.1
Three instruments. Three properties of rock. One piece of ground.
Why three
Why we ran three.
Two kinds of rock down there are heavy. Only one of them is what we're drilling for.
Barite is a dense industrial mineral. Walton dug it out of an open pit for fourteen years.5
Sulphide is the rock that carries the metal. Silver, copper, lead, zinc.
Both are heavy. So a gravity survey on its own can't tell you which one it has found.
But they behave differently with electricity. Barite blocks a current. Sulphide carries one.6
Which is why we didn't stop at gravity.
The honest answer
So is our Sturgis target a silver deposit?
Not yet, and no survey can answer that.
Gravity measures weight. Heavy rock at depth can be silver-bearing sulphide, or it can be barite, or iron with manganese.6
Before you write that off, look at what happened next door. At Walton the barite sat directly on top of the silver. They mined it for fourteen years before a drill hole in 1955 found the sulphide underneath.57
So barite isn't a dead end here. It's just not the thing we're aiming at, and it's exactly why we're running one more round of surveys before we put a drill into this target.
What we know
But we already know there's silver here.
The Walton Mine sits nearly adjacent to our ground.3
Before it took on water in 1970, it produced silver at grades between 350 and 933 grams per tonne.5
In 2023 we drilled the same rock formation on our side of the line, and the core came back carrying silver and copper.2
The hole did what it was drilled to do. It proved the structural model.1
Our own presentation calls the target drill ready.1
We know this ground carries silver. We don't yet know if the anomaly does.
There's only one way to find out.
The order
There's a reason we're buying surveys before we buy metres.
The rock down there is folded back on itself. Our 2023 hole came up with the sequence reversed and crossed the target formation twice.1
Which tells you two things. The subsurface repeats. And a hole aimed a few degrees wrong can pass straight through the whole thing and find nothing.
A deep hole in this ground is expensive. Every metre spent in the wrong limb of a fold is a metre not spent in the right one.
Resolution is cheaper than a wasted hole.
So the plan doesn't stop at drilling. Every hole gets downhole geophysics run in it afterwards: electromagnetics and induced polarisation, reading the ground the hole just passed through.1
That matters because a drill hole only samples the rock it physically touches. Downhole surveys see out sideways from it, picking up anomalies within about 150 metres of the hole that the core itself would never show.1
Every one of those readings goes back into our AI-assisted 3-D models, and the models get sharper with each hole rather than each hole being a standalone bet. Where the data justifies it, we can wedge a daughter hole off the parent rather than collaring a new one from surface.1
That's the risk mitigation. We're not buying one expensive guess. We're buying a sequence where each hole makes the next one more precise.
Underway now
What's happening right now.
We didn't drill new holes to run the downhole surveys.
Somebody drilled thirty-eight shallow holes in this area in the late 1960s and then walked away. Twenty-two of them went past 200 metres. We tracked down the paper logs and digitised them, and two of those holes had hit mineralization.82
Two of those old holes still had open casing. So we deepened them and set liners in them, which gets instruments down to depth for a fraction of what new collars would cost.9
Abitibi Geophysics is running downhole gravity and borehole electromagnetics in them now. AGCOS is coming back to re-run the ground AMT at tighter station spacing across a wider area.9
All of it goes into our AI-assisted 3-D models, and the targets get ranked against each other.
Then we drill.2
In short
Why we believe this one's worth chasing.
Three things.
- A large, coherent deep anomaly sits under our ground, in the structural position our model calls for, and no drill has ever been in it at depth.12
- Three distinct survey methods, each measuring a different property of rock, all point at the same ground.2
- And the work that narrows it down is underway right now, with a permit to drill it that runs to 2028.2
We'll leave you with this thought. Instruments can tell us where to point the drill. Only the drill tells us what's down there, and ours is permitted.
Now you're at the beginning of our story, and how you handle that timing is up to you.