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There is a particular kind of moment in mineral exploration when a company stops finding gold in isolated pockets and starts finding it in a pattern. Galleon Gold Corp. (OTCQX: GGOXF) (TSXV: GGO) appears to have reached that moment at its West Cache Gold Project, located about 8 miles west of Timmins, Ontario, a region that has produced gold for more than a century.
The company just released new drill results from what it calls Zone 9, a mineral structure buried deep beneath the surface of its property. The headline finding is not any single hole, but the shape of what is emerging. Drilling has now traced gold bearing rock 360 meters further down the plunge of the deposit, reaching a vertical depth of 500 meters. That puts it on a path toward another zone, called West Deep, that was discovered back in 2010 but has always been treated as a separate target.
Three holes anchor this update, and each tells a slightly different part of the story. Hole WC-26-238 returned 2.03 grams of gold per tonne over 23.25 meters, including a richer section of 6.01 grams per tonne over 4.05 meters. It sits about 60 meters below and 45 meters west of an earlier hole that had already returned a strong 16.07 grams per tonne over 9.25 meters, and the new result helps confirm the two intercepts are part of the same continuous system rather than a coincidence. Hole WC-26-240, drilled roughly 200 meters below the area where the company plans its first bulk sample, returned 2.61 grams per tonne over 12 meters. That matters because it shows the gold grade is holding up at depth, not fading out the further the drill goes. A third hole, WC-26-236, returned more modest grades but extended the known width of this deeper mineralization to more than 125 meters along strike, which geologists use to refine where the next holes should be aimed.
David Russell, the company’s chief executive and president, framed the update in terms of scale rather than any single number. He said the most important takeaway is that Zone 9 now behaves as one continuous system across 500 meters of vertical extent, with its geometry increasingly pointing toward West Deep.
That last point is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is the real subject of this release. Zone 9 and West Deep have been drilled and interpreted separately for years. If ongoing work eventually proves the two are physically connected, the combined structure would represent a considerably larger mineralized corridor than either one considered alone, with obvious implications for how much gold the company can eventually claim and how it plans a future mine. Galleon Gold is careful to note that continuity has not yet been established and that more drilling is required before any such conclusion can be drawn.
The timing lines up with the company’s broader plan for the property. Galleon Gold is preparing an 86,500 tonne bulk sample program at West Cache, a step that typically precedes a decision about full scale mine development. The project sits in the Abitibi greenstone belt, a geological corridor known for hosting large gold deposits, and lies about 7 kilometers northeast of Pan American Silver Corp.’s (NYSE: PAAS) Timmins West Mine. Some of the historic drilling that informed today’s results, including a 2015 hole that returned 4.85 grams of gold per tonne over 4.6 meters, was completed years earlier by Teck Resources Limited (NYSE: TECK), underscoring how long this ground has attracted attention from larger mining companies.
Zone 9 remains open in every direction, with roughly 200 meters of untested plunge length still ahead of the drill bits. Galleon Gold says further results will be released as they come in, which suggests this particular story is still being written rather than concluded.
