On Maple Gold Mines Ltd (TSX-V:MGM, OTCQB:MGMLF).'s corporate presentation, the company cites the old mining adage that the 'best place to find a mine is right next to one', which is of course pertinent when considering the junior explorer's own portfolio of assets.
The company is situated in the active and highly strategic Abitibi Greenstone Gold Belt in Quebec, where it has a 400 square kilometre property package, close to excellent infrastructure, the property packages includes the past-producing Eagle, Telbel and Eagle West mines at the Joutel Project and a large established gold resource at the Douay Project.
The Joutel Project produced 1.1 million ounces of gold between 1974 and 1993 at an average life-of-mine gold price of around US$350 per ounce (much lower of course than today).
The company is partnered in a 50/50 joint venture with major Canadian producer Agnico Eagle Mines Limited to jointly advance the Joutel Project and the contiguous Douay Project, which already has a resource of 3.03 million gold ounces and growing.
The company also holds an exclusive option to acquire 100% control of the past producing Eagle mine, which is an inlier within the joint-ventured Joutel Project, where a Phase 3 (5,000 metre (m)) program is due to kick off imminently to follow up on the best results to-date, which included 11.4 grams per tonne (g/t) gold over 3 m and 24.4 g/t gold over 1 m.
So, for the junior resource investor, Maple Gold has already ticked several boxes, that are key to success in the exploration sector.
The company had C$17M in cash as last reported and Agnico funding a committed C$18.25M in exploration from 2021-2024. Therefore, Maple Gold has capital, it has advanced assets, an experienced team and partner (in Agnico) and operates in one of the best gold belts in Canada, known to be a great mining jurisdiction.
And according to CEO Matthew Hornor in a recent Proactive interview, a great deal of news flow, mainly drill data, is due to come out to the market during the rest of 2022 and beyond.
He explained that 30,000 m of drilling were anticipated to be completed across the company's assets this year, and so far, assays for only 5,000 m have been reported, leaving those from 25,000 m still to be disclosed to market.
Aside from the Phase 3 (5,000 m) program at Eagle, two rigs are turning on deep drill holes beneath and adjacent to the historical, producing, underground mine workings in the Telbel mine area at the Joutel Project. Maple Gold has said it also expects a fourth drill rig in November to start deep drilling at Douay.
"This is one of the most target-rich environments I've ever operated in, on any project, anywhere in the world," Hornor told Proactive's Stephen Gunnion, referring to the company's asset base.
"We are chasing scale at Douay, high-grades at Joutel and have an incredible queue of exploration targets to test with a big brother in Agnico funding most of the work. You're not going to hit on every hole of course, but we're finding more fire where the smoke is and that's leading us to the next exploration programs and giving us a lot more confidence that we can deliver a quantum leap as we move forward committed to growth."
Hornor said that the Phase 3 Eagle drilling would see the rigs test further down plunge from what was historically extracted, and parallel along strike from where they started exploring originally back in the 1960’s and 70’s.
"Back in the 1970’s they started production at the high-grade Eagle Mine and drifted across on trend to mine a single zone at Telbel. We're following the same pattern along trend where we believe additional mineralized shoots might exist given what the historical drill results and new 3D model shows us. We are starting closer to known mineralization and going deeper and deeper to get to what may end up being the heart of the source rock and the high-grade sections."
Meanwhile, Hornor noted that the company agreed to co-fund (50/50) an additional C$4.8million budget with Agnico (beyond Agnico’s Year 2 committed funding) to drill deep holes at Douay at Telbel, on the hunt for larger accumulations of higher-grade gold.
"Above the zone mined at Telbel (from 500m to 1000 m) there was no follow-up exploration drilling to define additional resources. Why? Because Agnico historically operated with a cut-off of 6 g/t and any material that appeared to be less than that was not of interest back then. In today's gold price environment, relatively shallow 2-6 g/t material can be very attractive.
"So everything near surface there remains and as we cut through this interval with our deep drilling we're going to learn a lot more about what else is there that may have been left behind, which has us very excited to continue testing these targets."
"And then further off to the southeast from the known Telbel mine, we're looking at an area that had 80 g/t and 15 g/t hits from limited historical drilling, we're chasing that as well."
Honor said there were many 'horizons' that the company would be going though.
At the Douay property, drilling will target geological potential up to 2,000 meters deep to test what the Company believes has real game-changing potential. This is a shared vision with our JV partners who had incredible success at similar depth in similar age and type of rock at their East Goldie discovery which uncovered 6.4m oz of higher-grade, he added.
"It's amazing that this kind of work program has never happened over the course of the history at this project - over 40 years. It's something that nobody else would do without an Agnico partner along for the ride and we're extremely excited about the potential of what we might find down there," said Hornor.
Maple Gold is an investment story, which is well worth keeping an eye on.
Judging by the amount of potential drilling news that is likely to emanate from the company in the coming months, with multiple drill rigs turning through the end of Q1 2023, there should be plenty of catalysts to watch out for from this uniquely positioned gold story.