The Northern Miner’s Henry Lazenby highlights the best gold assays of the past week, May 24-31. Drill holes are ranked by gold grade x width as identified using the Mining Intelligence platform.
The southern hemisphere produced the week’s top three assays, with Red 5 (ASX: RED) reporting hot hits at the Darlot mine in Australia, Collective Mining (TSX: CNL) pushing the porphyry system limits at Guayabales in Colombia, and Aurumin (ASX: AUN) hitting high-grade gold at the Sandstone project, also in Western Australia.
Darlot/King of the Hills
Australia’s Red 5 announced on May 27 that hole GC4564 cut 5.2 metres (actual width at 1.15 metres) at 191.54 grams gold per tonne from 34.1 metres depth for a width x grade value of 996.
The hole was part of a resource expansion and grade control drilling campaign. The underground drilling strengthens and de-risks the 2025 mine plan, which broadly entails delivering high-grade ore to the King of the Hills complex about 100 km away, Red 5 managing director Mark Williams said in a statement.
“This is expected to underpin a further increase in mine life at Darlot, with drilling programs set to continue for the remainder of this year and into next year,” he said.
Since the start of the year, the company has completed 21,400 metres of the planned 25,000-metre drilling program, with assays received for 19,360 metres of drilling.
Darlot hosts a global Joint Ore Reserves Committee-compliant 11.9 million tonnes in all categories, grading 4.1 grams gold per tonne for 1.5 million oz. of metal.
Guayabales in Colombia
Collective Mining reported the week’s second-best assay on May 27, with hole APC-95 returning 513.7 metres grading 1.5 gram gold from 207.2 metres depth, for a width x grade value of 771.
The assays from three holes into the Apollo porphyry system at Guayabales show the system “materially expanding and widening to the northwest,” according to executive chairman Ari Sussman.
“Drilling over the balance of the year at Apollo will remain aggressive as we continue to push the limits of the system while simultaneously targeting high-grade sub-zones within the known mineralization envelope,” he said in the release.
Elsewhere on the Guayabales property, the company has completed the first two shallow drill holes at the Box target with core logging. They indicate there is an extensive hydrothermal fluid system in place with deeper drilling required from the next set of holes now underway.
Collective has five drill rigs operating at the project as part of its funded 40,000-metre drill program. Drill rigs are operating at the Apollo, Box, Olympus and Trap targets, with cores from several holes being assayed at ALS Laboratory in Lima, Peru, and further results are expected.
Sandstone in Western Australia
Aurumin’s reverse circulation hole SN_XP_RC_24_0036 on the Plum Pudding target returned 10 metres at 25.8 grams gold from 30 metres depth for a width x grade value of 464. The hole included higher-grade sections of 2 metres at 215.2 grams gold from 43 metres depth and 7 metres at 1.48 grams gold from 71 metres.
The first-pass drilling campaign at the site about 500 km northeast of Perth tested seven new open-pit targets and aimed to extend two open-pit resources released in April. Four of the seven new targets returned positive results, and extensional drilling yielded a bonanza result of 1 metre grading 344 grams gold at the Plum Pudding deposit.
As a result, Plum Pudding is now a priority target for additional work to expand the resource base.
Aurumin has a JORC-compliant total resource of 18.5 million tonnes at 1.5 grams gold for 881,300 oz. metal held in open-pit and underground resources.
The Central Sandstone project includes a 500,000-tonne per year carbon-in-leach plant, infrastructure, operating licences, a permitted tailings storage facility and bore field, and camp facilities. These are located on freehold titles within the nearby town of Sandstone.
