Year End: Merry Christmas
To mix my holidays, 2024 seemed to me to be the year of The Great Pumpkin. In Peanuts, Linus has an unshakable faith that, on Halloween, The Great Pumpkin will appear and, Santa-like, give gifts to all the children. Of course, The Great Pumpkin never appears but Linus’ faith is unshaken.
So it is with junior resource investors. Lots of news, gold hitting all time highs, silver just itching to break out and junior resource stocks just sit or, worse, drop a bit. But, like Linus, we keep the faith hoping that next year will be different.
As I write this I am waiting on the results of Bayhorse Silver’s (BHS.V) underground drilling in Oregon. We won’t have assays by Christmas but we will have some indication if the VTEM anomaly under the Bayhorse Mine bears any resemblance to the copper porphyry Hercules Metals (BIG.V) is drilling down the Snake River at Mt. Cuddy. (See below.)
For the junior resource companies themselves we might think of 2024 as a “building” year.
For example, Canadian Critical Minerals (CCMI.V) spent the year optimizing its stockpile mining operation. In October it shipped over 1000 tons grading 4.67% Cu, 0.74 g/t Au and 44.7 g/t Ag and received USD $378,000 for the rock. In November, as expected, winter cut the tonnage shipped nearly in half at 524 tonnes. The ore sorter does not do well on wet rock and it snowed at the Bull River Mine. Nonetheless the company received USD$198,000 for the November 2024 shipments. The mineralized material sent to New Afton graded 5.02% Cu, 1.05 g/t Au and 50.4 g/t Ag. Presumably, the trucking costs were cut by half as well and the overall operation will have made money. Especially when the USD are converted to dwindling Canadian dollarettes.
Using the ore sorter to high grade the rock shipped makes sense because the rejected rock will be stockpiled for processing at the mine when the mine and mill are permitted. There will be a couple of months of reduced throughput which will coincide with the Department of Highways load restrictions but it should be full steam ahead in February or March. Meanwhile the permits should be advancing.
I wrote about Cartier Resources (ECR.V) and CEO Philippe Cloutier’s big drilling plans for 2025 over at Motherlodetv.net. Cloutier has a lot to drill. In a press release a couple of days ago, ECR announced another successful hole, 44.7 g/t Au over 0.5 m and 7.5 g/t Au over 4.6 m which extends the strike length on the East Cadillac property to 10 km.
In the release Cloutier states,
“The 10 high-grade gold areas discovered in 2024 are, located within 5 km on either side of the NI 43-101 resource estimate, in a prolific fault zone recognized for its mining potential and reported in a high gold price environment, provide the key elements required for rapid development of the East Cadillac asset”
With nearly 3 million indicated and inferred gold ounces already in its Mineral Resource Estimate, Cartier is looking to radically increase its drill program in 2025. In our Motherlodetv.net interview Cloutier told me, ““In 2024 we drilled 28,082 meters in 162 holes,” said Cloutier. “Next year we plan to drill 100,000 meters in roughly 500 holes.”
These will all be relatively shallow holes with four or five drills running simultaneously. It should make for a firehose of press releases and a steady accumulation of the results which can take Cartier from 3 million ounces to 7 million plus in short order. In many cases the shallow holes will be left open at depth. Cloutier knows that in the Abitibi district gold showings often extend well beyond 1000 meters, but in this intense first pass Cartier is simply confirming gold along the 10km strike length.
And, the day after I started this Bayhorse put out the update press release I was hoping for. As I wrote a few days ago, it is very important for a junior resource company to keep its investors and the market at large up to date, but the CEO and QP can only say what they can actually confirm. Until the core has been assayed we have to be content with O’Neill’s fairly general comment,
“the drilling entering into a highly siliceous brecciated zone, and the presence of elevated levels of copper, is very encouraging.”
The core picture at the top of this piece is, however, delightfully suggestive. If you are looking for a copper porphyry or massive sulfides blue and green are colours you want to see. But O’Neill cannot say that.
Interestingly, my other holding on the Izee/Olds Ferry terrane suture belt, Hercules Metals (BIG.V), published core photos of all its holes including its discovery hole, HER-23-05. You can see them here.
The BHS core is a lot greener and bluer, but it looks rather similar.
I’d note, however, that the BHS core is actually taken from drilling before the drill reached the VTEM indicated anomaly. What the BHS core indicates at this point is,
The Company’s senior consulting geologists have suggested the zone is a highly silicified hydrothermal polymictic breccia. It contains multiple rounded, “milled” clasts that probably resulted from high pressure fluids derived from a buried pluton streaming up through the breccia.
These are the conditions in which minerals can form deposits as they precipitate from the fluids. Having these sorts of rocks show up in the drill core suggests Bayhorse is on the right track.
The market took a beat to figure out the BHS news but on Friday popped $0.02 to $0.08. A couple more core pictures and we might see $0.10 by New Years. But the real story, and the potential for the real “pop” will be the assays expected in the early New Year.
We’ll have a better idea soon as the Bayhorse crew is drilling day and night to drive into the indicated anomaly before they break for Christmas.
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This may be the year The Great Pumpkin finally arrives. Fingers crossed.
Merry Christmas!
