One of the gold explorers that has had my attention for the last two years is Endurance Gold (TSX-V:EDG, OTC: ENDGF). Endurance's flagship Reliance Project in the Bralorne Gold Camp of British Columbia (roughly a four hour drive north from Vancouver) has delivered high-grade gold drill intercepts over widths ranging from 4 meters to nearly 30 meters. Furthermore, the vast majority of drilling at Reliance in 2021/2022/2023 has been at relatively shallow depths, with Endurance only probing deeper than 200 meters recently.
In December, Endurance published excellent drill results from the Imperial Zone at Reliance and this morning the company followed up by delivering another excellent high-grade gold intercept at the Eagle Zone (Endurance Reports 5.8 g/t Gold Over 23 Meters At Eagle Zone). At the end of December, I figured it was a good time to speak with Endurance Gold CEO Robert Boyd for additional color on the recent results and the company’s plans for 2024.
This is a sponsored post on behalf of Endurance Gold Corp.
Goldfinger
I am here with Endurance Gold’s CEO, Robert Boyd. The symbol is EDG on the TSX Venture Exchange. Endurance Gold is a company that I've owned and written about since August 2021. They put out news just before the Christmas break from the Imperial zone at the Reliance project in BC, in the Bralorne mining gold camp of southern BC. I want to ask Robert about that news. I’ll start the conversation there and then we'll get into the whole company story. So basically, my understanding of the key takeaway is that you drilled two holes at Imperial. The headline hole was 7.93 grams per ton gold over 7.4 meters and another hole #82 returned 3.61 grams over 16 meters and 4.56 grams over 7.3 meters. These holes are showing that the Imperial zone is thickening at depth and you're estimating the width of the Imperial Zone at depth in the area tested is now 30 meters wide with multiple gold intercepts over that width. So can you tell us about these two holes, Robert?
Robert Boyd
Thanks. It's a real pleasure to join you, Robert, and provide you an update on the most recent release. We're obviously pretty keen on the drilling we've been doing this year and in prior years, We have now completed 82 diamond drill holes as well as 84 reverse-circulation drill holes. The recent release was on the deeper extensions of the Imperial zone which is the deepest part of the entire 1.5 kilometers long gold system we have discovered so far. In that deep Imperial area we've identified what looks like a flattening in the structure. So it's a relatively steep dipping structure. And when it flattens a bit, it looks like it creates a permissibility of the system to open up with potential for up to about 30 meters of multiple mineralized intervals in that area.
We initially had one or two holes in that area announced earlier in the year. We thus followed up with an additional two holes to try and test our concept of what might be the plunge direction of this fatter area of mineralization. And this is where we've hit on these two holes confirming that we've got a wider zone down there. It's important to emphasize that wherever we drill on the Imperial zone so far, we got good drill intersections with pretty good encouragement. But in this deeper area we have just tested, we see a fattening resulting in the stacking of several zones with an area of wider associated strong alteration. And it's probably related to a big regional scale with a shallow-plunging flexure in this structure creating more openings for relatively shallow, plunging mineralization. So we tested and seem to have proved the concept of a shallow plunge in this area.
And with these two drill holes, we've now opened a system up where this fatter portion of the Imperial area zone is about 200 meters of strike potential and probably about 100 meters vertical. But wherever we drill Imperial so far, we have good drill intersections, indicating it's a strong mineralized system. And Imperial is about 600 meters away along this same structure from the Eagle zone, which has attracted a lot of our drilling attention to date. And there we have a very high success ratio as well. So the Imperial is just sort of one area on this structure over about 1.5 kilometers, where we’ve drilled. And that structure of these 82 diamond drill holes we’ve drilled, we’ve got assay results in 70% of those drill holes with significant intersections (greater than 3.0 meters of greater than 3.4 grams per tonne gold).
And about 24 of these 82 diamond drill holes have intersections exceeding 50 gram-meters. We include some of these better intersections at Imperial within the best of the drill intersections to date. So we've got a system that's very pregnant for gold. For an orogenic gold system, when you get roughly 70% of your holes having better than ten gram-meters in a program like this, on wide space drilling, that's pretty indicative of a strong mineralizing system, especially when you get a high percentage, exceeding 20%, with much better intersections. So we're encouraged by our drilling statistics to date.
We're starting to get a handle on that now at Imperial, which is the deepest part of the system we've penetrated to date. So we've got gold intersections now over about 600 meters of vertical extent and 1.5 kilometers strike with that kind of success ratio. There is a gap in there, about four hundred meters or so, that still needs drilling to confirm gold content in that gap between the Imperial and Eagle zones. So lots of exploration potential in front of us, lots of encouragement to date, and we're onto a pretty significant new discovery of an orogenic type gold system, but a shallower exposure of an orogenic gold systemOur discovery at Reliance is not classic veins, it's breccias and vein stockworks indicating a multi-phase mineralizing event hosted within laterally continuous fault breccias that are quite significant in their regional extent and scale.
Goldfinger
So when I first looked into the company in 2021, one of the things that really attracted me was the high grade of the results that you had at that point of time. And the hit ratio to me seemed to be quite high. Having followed over 100 gold exploration companies over the years and read a lot of their corporate news and results updates, it struck me as you guys have really keyed in on something here that is out of the ordinary and understanding the setting of this project. It seems like you have a lot of the key ingredients in place for, as you said, a pregnant gold system. One of the things that you put in your presentation is this analog to the Fosterville gold mine in Australia.
So for those who don't know, or even for those who know, Fosterville has produced something in the order of 10 million ounces of gold over its history. The average grade of Fosterville is quite extraordinary. There are some parts of that deposit that are over 40 grams per tonne, most notably the Swan zone, which was something that was discovered later on. And it was discovered at a pretty great depth of over 1,000 meters in some areas, and it continued to widen and become higher grade at depth. And so, when I looked at the results that you put out just before the Christmas break, I said, well, still early days and we're only about 200 meters deep here at Imperial, but there's some favorable signs there. The system is thickening at depth.
So can you tell us about the analogy to Fosterville and some other parts of the Royal Shear zone that suggest potential for favorable changes in mineralization at depth?
Robert Boyd
I'm happy to. Robert. Orogenic gold systems continue to be studied by academics and explorationists like myself. Classic orogenic gold systems are what everybody's used to. That is the high grade quartz vein systems in Archaean gold settings, typically. But there are younger age orogenic gold systems and the Bralorne camp is an example of a younger Orogenic gold system that looks very much like the classic Archaean examples. The Bralorne mine is a classic crack and seal high grade vein system, and it has produced over 4 million ounces of high-grade gold and represents the largest historic gold producer in the province of British Columbia. It's a significant producer. These orogenic gold systems can be quite large. And our new discovery at Reliance is only about 10 km away in the same Bralorne Orogenic camp. But Reliance looks totally different and perhaps the reason it was overlooked.
Reliance is hosted in breccias, and it's in a part of the Orogenic gold system that's related to brittle deformation. And at Reliance we have stronger antimony or stibnite association, which you don't really see in any significance at the Bralorne mine. So what this suggests is that we're at the higher level of deposition in the new Orogenic gold models that have been evolving through academic research since the late 1980s and 1990s. It is now understood that these Orogenic gold deposits occur in a spectrum of depositional environments. The systems that occur at mid-level, where you have a more ductile deformation and get crack and seal veins. But when you get into higher depositional levels, you often have an antimony type of signature associated with mineralization in brittle domains. Fosterville is a classic example of where the system was initially mined in the upper depositional levels. Fosterville was mined for many years in the higher levels, in a fine gold system associated with antimony.
And as they were mining over the years, Fosterville transitioned at depth into these significant coarse gold systems, like you find at the Swan zone at depth on Fosterville. And that came in the more recent history of the mine production. I don't think they really appreciated that those kinds of coarse gold systems were there, sitting below what they had in terms of the antimony-bearing fine gold systems near surface. And so that's where the analogy comes in terms of the potential. We're in a camp at Bralorne that is Cretaceous age gold mineralization so these higher levels of deposition can be preserved. There's a classic orogenic gold system of crack and seal veins in the historic mined area. And we're in a different part of that same camp where there's antimony or stibnite association with the gold, associated with brittle deformation. And where you find that mineralization, like we've discovered, is in tabular laterally continuous fault breccias that have encouraging widths in the attitude of veins.
But they're actually breccias over quite a significant strike extent and so, just like any orogenic gold system, they're structurally controlled. So if you have areas of dilatancy, those are often the areas where you get fatter zones of mineralization. And we think we've identified one of those types of zones here at the Imperial. That shows that maybe there's a fatter zone where the system widens up and you get multiple intersections. So, for instance, we announced these two holes in December, there were six significant intersections in two holes. And each hole had the collective intersection in each hole amounted to essentially a plus 30 meters wide zone of stacked mineralization in the areas. And then as you move up the structure, it tightens up. But you still get pretty significant widths of 4 or 5 meters.
Even when we get up higher in the system, we don't know what's happening at depth. The system is open. We're seeing at Imperial, it's the deepest intersection we've got in the system to date. About 200 meters below the surface. But the system is still open at depth. And the alteration looks like it's widening down there at depth. So it's open to a lot of potential to grow at depth. And then, because of our topography, our Eagle zone is a little higher up on the hill. So it means that we have about 600 meters of vertical extent of mineralization already indicated. Showing that this is a type of classic orogenic gold system. Once you're onto those shoots, the mineralization continues to significant depth in these systems.
And if you're in the high level or “epizonal” type of orogenic setting, it likely transitions deeper into a crack and seal, or a higher grade, coarse gold type gold system.
Goldfinger
Okay, so why don't you share your screen. And let's take a look at the longitudinal section. Of the entire strike extent there.
Robert Boyd
I have opened at our corporate slide, the key point here is that insiders own plus 50%, three of us as directors. So it's a very tightly held company. We're market capitalized roughly at about C$26 million with about 150,000,000 shares outstanding. We had a working capital at the end of September, about $2.6 million Canadian. I have 40 years of experience in the business and I own about 6% of the company. And the other directors also all have excellent experience in the business with US-based Richard Gilliam and Ross Arnold as the two largest shareholders. So we're quite aligned with our public shareholders. The company is tightly held and our goal is to deliver what we can in terms of discovery potential for all shareholders, including ourselves.
So to move onto our longitudinal section This shows what I was just referring to about the vertical continuity of the mineralizing system. There is topography in our discovery area, so with the hill we already have good vertical exposure of the discovery. We've identified this Eagle zone at the upper hill where we have a lot of good intersections. And the red dots here represent the fattest zones of mineralization of plus 50 grams meter type hits. The drilling we've just reported here is in one of the deeper parts of the vertical systems. That vertical 600 meters is referring to the highest elevation intersections at Eagle and the lowest elevation intersections down here in the deeper part of this Imperial zone. And we've identified a zone here that was based on the plunge direction of something like this, is what we're determining now. There's about 200 meters of strike in the plunge direction. And the fatter portion of that system, up to 30 meters wide.
Part of the portion of the system at Imperial is about 100 meters vertical and open at depth here. And this is an area that's still somewhat untested between the Imperial and Eagle zones. We had intended to get into drilling that area in 2023, but we got shut down with forest fire activity and evacuation order during the most important time of our drill season. We were evacuated for about six weeks and with the logistics of getting things back up and operating again, we lost about two months of drilling. So one of our goals this year was to test all of this area at depth below Eagle zone which we missed in getting completed. What we got done was some deeper holes up in this southeast area under Eagle, and shallower holes at Eagle where the results are pending. And those results are still to come, probably sometime in January (UPDATE: 1/8/2024 News Release).
The deep testing in this area and filling in the gap between the Imperial and Eagle in that 1.5 kilometers trend is where we still have to drill. The 600 meters of vertical extent that would be from here at upper Eagle down to here at deep Imperial where we've hit here are about 200 meters below the surface. So really pretty encouraging.
It's important to emphasize that this Reliance property is well located in the Bralorne gold camp about a four-hour drive north of Vancouver. So this property is road accessible year round. And we can have very long drill seasons here if we desire. Especially at the lower elevations. The higher elevations had some colder weather and snow and that pushed us out here with completion of 2023 drilling in November.
So we focused our fall drilling on opening up the system at depth at Imperial, some deep Eagle drilling to the southeast and testing that shallower area at Eagle and Crown.
Goldfinger
So just looking at this longitudinal section, it strikes me as you have a pretty good density of drilling in the Eagle zone there, but it's pretty shallow. You've started to add a little more drill density down at Imperial, but still, I think there's a lot of room for expansion down there. And then it just strikes me you've got really impressive high-grade intervals, relatively near surface in all zones, and there's a feeder, there's probably multiple feeders coming up from depth that's causing all that gold to show up within 200 meters of surface. So what have you learned from drilling in 2022 and 2023 about maybe these feeder systems or structures? I guess that's the right way to say it, structures. And how do you target those structures at depth?
Robert Boyd
Well, that longitudinal shows you some of the key intersections. And when we first began exploring up at Eagle, based on what we were finding on surface in channel samples and RC drilling we initially thought we had a fairly shallow dipping system up there. Whereas at Imperial, we thought the drilling that we'd done initially indicated something steeper dipping. When we first discovered Eagle we hadn't done the drilling to identify the steeper part of the system. We now feel they're all part of the same structural and mineralizing system that's over that 1.5 kilometers strike length. And there's portions of this system that are shallower dipping than other areas.
Those variations in dip of the system are probably what's creating the opening and significant mineralizing potential. We haven't fully defined the plunge of this Eagle system, but it may have a shallow plunge of the fatter zones that's opened up just like at Imperial. So that's part of the reason why, on the longitudinal, you see a lot of really good intersections up here nearer to surface. So this could be another one of these shallow, plunging type systems like we've got at Imperial, but this one outcrops at Eagle, and we are still picking up good intersections at depth, like 15 grams per tonne over 3 meters and 11 meters of 3 grams per tonne at depth at Eagle. And we started to open up and try to understand how the Eagle system expresses to the southeast here. And that's the results that are pending.
And our goal was to try and test even further in here, but we didn't get to that because of our loss of two months. But the pending results were testing this area to look at continuity and the variation and continuity between that shallow dipping structure that we had at Eagle that I was referring to and what we previously referred to as feeder structures. They're all the same structure, it would seem that it's just a variation in dips and sometimes multiple zones that exist over an 80 meters width in places. This kind of shows a section of what's happening up at Eagle as an example, and you see that up at Eagle, there are multiple structures, and they're kind of linking shallower dipping features between some of those steeper mineralized structures here at Eagle.
Whereas at Imperial, which is what we're seeing here, the two intersections that we just reported, the hole numbers 81 and 82, we have a steeper dipping system. There are shallower components near surface up here as well. And you can see where the alteration is opening and widening at depth. And this is the flattening, slight flexure, as you can see in this structure that roughly differentiates a dominantly sedimentary terrain from a dominantly mafic volcanic terrain. And that's that interface structure is where the mineralizing event seems to be located in the area. When there's a slight variation in the dip of that feature, we get fattening of the mineralization. So you can see that this feature is about 600 meters north at Imperial. And then you go back up to Eagle and see the same structural association.
So this Eagle cross-section is almost 600 meters or 700 meters away from that other cross-section at Imperial. You can see the system setting is identical. It's the same setting between a dominantly sedimentary terrain and a dominantly mafic volcanic terrane. And that system is just continuous and has various widths and shallower structures within the entire 1.5 kilometer trend and still open. And up at Eagle, we seem to have more shallow structures than we see up at Imperial. But that may be just a reflection of the density of drilling. So what we're seeing here is a very continuous system. Mineralization is always associated in that same structural setting between dominantly sediments and mafic volcanics, which is a classic orogenic type geological setting. And this is all hosted within a regional-scale brittle ductile structure over a significant width on this section. This late Royal Shear fault, a structural marker for us, is parallel to and within this regional scale wide structure that separates this sedimentary terrain from the volcanic terrane. So orogenic gold systems can be like this in the large gold camps. They're big systems, and they all form in compressional regimes. So where there's lots of structural activity, continental collision type areas, and you actually have fluids that come up from depth, and at depth you get a Bralorne type system of crack and seal veins. But up higher in the depositional setting like at Reliance, the structures that control mineralization are all brittle type structures. And the mineralization we've had to date is primarily associated with fault breccias and quartz stockwork in tabular vein type attitudes expressed as fault breccias, so you don't see the classic veins.
And so that's probably why the system was overlooked by the old timers. There weren't any big vein float sitting on surface, nor coarse nuggets shedding from the area. It was all fine gold associated with a small percentage of weathered sulfide content with the gold in breccia fragments, breccia matrix and late quartz stockworks.
Goldfinger
Yeah, I mean that makes sense that the old timers didn't have the eyes to unlock this system. They were looking for veins, and that was the wrong thing to be looking for.
Robert Boyd
Yeah, this photo on this figure is an example of a road cut that was actually excavated in the mid-1980s by a prospector that owned this property but never sampled it, because there's no obvious veins or vein float shedding from the road cut. There's a narrow quartz stibnite vein in here related to associated stockwork, but basically most of the width of this zone is fine-grained gold in breccias that averaged 4.88 grams per tonne over 23 meters.
That high-grade channel sample right under the talus fines and explains the high gold values from the soil horizon in this area where you get a deep orange-coloured oxidation. You can just dig that mineralized zone out with a shovel. This channel sample ran about 15 grams per tonne over just under 2 meters here. But you see that is not obvious, right? It's not a vein. And if you saw ANY Quartz veins, there were silicified little veinlets or stockwork like this stibnite vein here.
This detailed longitudinal section at Eagle, showing how we've got a very high consistency of plus 50 grams meter type drill intersections over this 550 meters of strike here. And the Eagle system is still open on strike, and it continues to be mineralized at depth.
We just haven't got down and drilled sufficiently at depth yet because there may be another one of these flexure openings at depth at Eagle similar to what we have identified at the Imperial zone. Could this Imperial flexure come up and plunge through this Eagle area at depth? We don’t know yet and that's the type of exploration we have to continue to do. And if we can find those systems, they deliver a lot of tonnes per vertical foot very quickly.
Goldfinger
Sort of sum it up. So you have 1,500 meters strike extent so far, 600 meters vertical extent. I think the fatter zone at Imperial is about 150 to 200 meters in size, and you got a hit rate of over 70% of significant gold intersections over more than 80 holes. As you said, it's a very pregnant gold system. I think we can confidently say that. Next question, what's next for the company in 2024? How aggressive do you think you're going to be in spring and summer 2024 drilling? And I see you're pulling up the full property claims package. What's the scale potential here? I mean, obviously you have the potential for multiple parallel shear zones, right?
Robert Boyd
Yeah, we do. And all of that drilling we've been doing is strictly these two structures at the Royal Shear and Treasure shear. All the diamond drill holes are strictly on the Royal Shear structure. Which is evidenced by this soil anomaly shown on the figure. There had never been a gold-in-soil sample survey done on this Royal Shear trend until we acquired it in 2020. But when you're in orogenic camps in compressional regimes, there's always lots of structures, right? And often it's the big regional structures that are not necessarily the ones that are mineralized, but these relatively smaller subsidiary structures. And on our property, there's at least five or six of these subparallel northwest-southeast trending structures. The Bralorne mine is also on one of these northwest-southeast trending structural trends about 10 kilometers away. On the Reliance property we've got multiple structures. You can see them forming linears on this figure.
We've got soil and surface geochem anomalies associated with at least two other structures on our property that need to be tested at some point. And in fact, the only other past producer in the Bralorne camp was the Minto mine, which we also control and located along one of these other structures that parallel the Royal shear trend. It's just on the north side of this carpenter Lake Reservoir here. Minto produced about 17,000 ounces of gold back in the early part of the century. So there's a lot of other potential. And our goal was to consolidate the known antimony prospects in the Bralorne camp. Because we interpreted that all these antimony prospects are probably representing the higher level epizonal, Fosterville type gold targets in the camp. And they've been really ignored in the past because of what I just showed you in that road cut.
They didn't have big flashy veins associated with them. The mineralization is probably associated with these brittle faults zones and breccias. Where are we heading in the future? Well, number one is to build out this system. And hopefully deliver a resource potential on it. So we would need to be able to dedicate at least two drills to the property in this coming year. Also advance some of these other targets to the permitting stage so we can do some initial testing on them. We've got the geochem anomalies over here, but they don't have the same strength and tenor of this one as at the Royal shear. And that's largely because this Olympic area has a late cover of gravels and other cover that make the exploration a little more challenging.
But we have had grab samples like Enigma here of over nine grams per tonne gold coming out of this structure here, and several five to six gram types of numbers in grabs along this trend. So we know these structures are gold bearing and we just now have to test them and find the fatter portions of the alteration, probably with some initial RC drill testing or something like that. So the future program would be focusing on building out this system to a resource and then make new discoveries in the camp on these other parallel structures that we control, especially the lower elevation areas that are road accessible year round.
And then you go up into alpine type terrain down here, which is much more seasonal exploration, where down here you can explore, have a very long drill season and access this area. This is the main highway on the north side of the Carpenter reservoir. And I say a reservoir because this is the BC hydro reservoir that services the lower mainland with its hydroelectric power.
Only 5 kilometers away from our property is another power dam that provides local hydroelectric power as well. So great infrastructure. The town of Goldbridge is 4 kilometers from our property, the town of Bralorne that services the Bralorne mine currently being re-evaluated for production is also nearby, as well as other recreational communities in the area as well. So the area is quite accessible year round to these activities and exploration once we advance it to a certain stage.
Goldfinger
So 2023 was by all accounts one of the most challenging years the junior mining sector has had in at least a couple of decades. Some people say it was like 2015, it's different from 2015, but in some ways it was similar in terms of investor sentiment and lack of interest in the gold exploration sector. There are some signs that we're turning the corner here as we end 2023 and move into 2024. If you could just sort of summarize as concisely as possible, what did you learn during 2023 and how do you take that learning and apply it to what you'll do in 2024?
Robert Boyd
We've started to get a much better understanding of the structural controls because there's a lot of structure in this camp. This is the collisional domain where two continents collided. So there's no shortage of structure. And what's important is to understand which structures are related to and control the gold mineralization? That's always a challenge when you're in an orogenic camp, because they're often in very complicated structural terranes. So we've got these fault breccias that are associated with a cretaceous age of gold mineralization. And that mineralizing event is exactly the same age and fluid chemistry as the Bralorne Mine. So we now have to try and say, okay, what are our controls? And what we've announced in our press release of yesterday was, hey, it looks like we're on to an understanding that maybe these are reverse listric type structures that have variations and flexures in them.
And those variations and shifts in dip may be the openings that are creating shallow, plunging shoots like what we are starting to see at Imperial. And here we are on this figure looking at our Reliance longitudinal compared with the Fosterville analogy, which also has shallow, dipping, plunging shoots. And this is our drill penetrations at Reliance at approximately the same scale, showing the excellent remaining exploration potential at Reliance. It wasn't until Fosterville was ten years into mining, that they started to find these coarse gold systems at depth that delivered excellent profitability to Fosterville. This was at about 400 meters below surface when that rough transition from the fine gold system into coarse gold system occurred at depth. So what does that say about Reliance, well, how deep do we have to go? We don't know exactly where that transition is yet.
On our project, it could be 400 meters or it could be 2 kilometers, we don't know yet, but we have to continue to explore, build out the resource potential that justifies what we've got, and do some deeper drilling to say, does this system open up and turn into a coarser gold system at depth? So the benefit of these orogenic gold systems is they're often long lived mines. They can have multi-million ounce potential. And this is a camp that's really relatively unexplored, all things considered, by orogenic camp standards around the world. So just as Victoria State is now opening up in Australia because of Fosterville, and a lot of exploration and discoveries are coming out of that as a result. And we don't see why the same can't happen in this Bralorne Gold Bridge camp in British Columbia.
Goldfinger
Okay, if you could flip back to the longitudinal section, I just have one more question and then we can wrap it up. So in yesterday's news, you mentioned there's still seven holes pending assays. I think you said early January. For those. How many holes are pending? I'm seeing four in this longitudinal section.
Robert Boyd
Yeah, there's four with labels on it. We had nine holes coming into this, so two we've just announced, and there's seven additional holes that we've drilled all up in the Eagle area. Two of them were part of chasing the system of depth to southeast to try and understand if the system is open in that direction and then also testing in here is an area where we primarily had RC drilling to look at the transition from Eagle to Crown where we had an encouraging gold intersection earlier in 2023. What do we have to do now in terms of technology and testing to evaluate and deliver a shallow resource. So part of that drilling was to test the current technology we have for gold recovery, and this shows two of those holes where we've got results pending up in this area. So basically, two holes to the southeast and five in this Eagle-Crown area.
Goldfinger
Got it. And then, I guess, the final question, Robert, this was a very insightful conversation. What can shareholders expect from Endurance in the first half of 2024?
Robert Boyd
Well, we still have to put our thoughts together and get all our results in hand, but our objective is to be back with a big program next year. As you see, we had over $2 million in working capital at the end of September. But if we start going into a bigger program, we would probably need to consider all our strategic financing alternatives that come with making sure that this project advances. And those strategic alternatives vary depending on the nature of the capital markets. If things are good, then we'll continue to equity finance this. We expect to be delivering continued results.
Our drilling statistics are holding up, if not improving, with our 2023 program with a 70% hit ratio, and if we can continue with that kind of hit ratio with our future drilling, there's every potential to deliver a very significant gold system here. So what we really want to do is to start building this out with two or more dedicated drill rigs, to try and bring to the project towards an initial indicated resource of some kind. So we can be comfortable in demonstrating to the public that this is a big gold system.
Goldfinger
I'm looking at a gold price here this morning, $2,050 an ounce. That's almost as high as gold has ever been. It's a pretty good gold price, and it seems to me like we're moving into a year where central banks around the world are going to be easing monetary policy. We've seen a trend of global central banks accumulating gold the last couple of years. There's no sign that's stopping anytime soon. So I look at a project like Endurance has in BC. Very high hit rate, high grade gold intercepts a lot of near surface gold with plenty of room for expansion. You're just starting to really understand the system a lot better. Seems like it needs a bigger drill program in 2024. And in my mind, some larger gold mining firms have got to be paying attention to what you guys are doing.
Robert Boyd
Absolutely. And we're disappointed that we didn't get more work done this year. I mean, we were messaging that a 15,000 meters program was warranted in 2023. We only got 5,000 meters because of our shutdown issues, and also partly due to the lack of interest in the capital markets as well. So why spend money if nobody really cares, right? We're sort of at that stage where this project continues to justify 15,000+ meters of drilling. And the best way to do that and deliver results on a much more consistent basis than we did with the deeper holes. This year, we could only deliver results maybe once a month. But once we get at least two drills operating, we can keep a pretty steady flow of news coming to shareholders and demonstrate how we're growing the system with more frequent and consistent updates.
Disclosure: Author owns shares of Endurance Gold at the time of publishing and may choose to buy or sell at any time without notice. Author has been compensated for marketing services by Endurance Gold Corp.
DISCLAIMER: The contents of this article have been reviewed and approved by Endurance Gold Corp. The article is for informational purposes only and is neither a solicitation for the purchase of securities nor an offer of securities. Readers of the article are expressly cautioned to seek the advice of a registered investment advisor and other professional advisors, as applicable, regarding the appropriateness of investing in any securities or any investment strategies, including those discussed above. The companies mentioned in this article are high-risk venture stocks and not suitable for most investors. Consult company’s SEDAR profiles for important risk disclosures.
The author of this article is not a registered investment advisor and advice you to do your own due diligence with a licensed investment advisor prior to making any investment decisions. This article contains certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation (collectively “forward-looking statements”). Certain information contained herein constitutes “forward-looking information” under Canadian securities legislation. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as “expects”, “believes”, “aims to”, “plans to” or “intends to” or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results “will” occur. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made and they are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed by such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, standard transaction risks; impact of the transaction on the parties; and risks relating to financings; regulatory approvals; foreign country operations and volatile share prices. Although management of the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Always thoroughly do your own due diligence and talk to a licensed investment adviser prior to making any investment decisions. Junior resource companies can easily lose 100% of their value so read company profiles on www.SEDAR.com for important risk disclosures. It’s your money and your responsibility.
