Freshly-listed gold explorer Elk Range Mining has completed a maiden drill hole at its Friday gold project in Idaho, USA, hitting more visible gold at multiple depths, including several occurrences well beyond the limits of historical drilling. With the first hole now in the bag and assays due in late October or early November, the company has kept the drill bit spinning, already chewing through Idaho rock around the clock.

The company’s maiden hole, part of an eight-hole, 2850-metre phase one program at Friday, finished at a final depth of 336.8 metres. It was designed to run parallel to a historical hole only 10m away, then push a further 200m into a sparsely drilled area to test for extensions to the known mineralisation.

Notably, after previously reporting visible gold at 122.53m downhole, Elk Range has now logged additional visible gold at four more separate depths of approximately 124.05m, 138.68, 159.87m and 233.78m.

Significantly, the three deepest occurrences all lie beyond the 137.16m end of the historical hole that the maiden effort was designed to twin. At 233.78m, the deepest speck of visible gold lit up within a veinlet extending for more than one centimetre, which itself sits 97m deeper than the historical hole’s end.

While the company cautions that visual estimates are not a substitute for laboratory assays, seeing visible gold both alongside and well below the historical intercepts is a very encouraging sign of what might be lurking below at the project. The drilling also recovered high-quality oriented core, providing what the company says is the Friday project’s first structural dataset directly tied to the visible gold.

We couldn’t have asked for a better start at Friday. Our very first hole, and we’re seeing visible gold in the core at five different depths, including more than 91.5 metres further downhole from where the historical drilling stopped in this portion of the mineralised trend. With assays pending and the second hole already underway, the maiden campaign is now advancing with a much stronger geological framework.

Elk Range already has the rig humming on a second hole being drilled from a separate pad 232m to the north-east. The hole is designed to infill historical drilling, increase drill density to support a future JORC-compliant mineral resource estimate and test for extensions to known high-grade mineralisation.

In a savvy move, the company has also sampled 113m of historical core and sent it off for a modern-day analytical once-over using a much larger 500-gram charge. The old core was originally tested using 50g fire assays, with the beefier sample size aimed at providing a better handle on grades in Friday’s locally coarse and nuggety gold system.

Elk Range’s Friday project already features a non-JORC foreign resource estimate of 758,000 tonnes grading a solid 5.91 grams per tonne (g/t) gold for 144,000 ounces. Its brownfields credentials add another big tick, with existing underground development and infrastructure all backed by its permitted 50,000-tonne-per-annum Orogrande processing plant and an on-site assay laboratory.

The previous owner poured a hefty US$40 million (A$57.4M) into Friday and Elk Range believes the plant could be restarted within 12 months, offering a potentially low-capital route to production. The timing could prove handy, too. Idaho is re-emerging as a mining hotspot, with major developments such as Perpetua Resources’ 4.8-million-ounce Stibnite gold project, 150 kilometres to the south, recently clearing key permitting and court hurdles, a strong signal the state is open for mining business and attracting serious capital.

For Elk Range, Friday may only be the opening act. The company’s broader Idaho gold project includes its Buffalo Gulch and Deadwood deposits, carrying respective non-JORC-compliant gold resources of 140,000 and 59,000 ounces. Management believes the surrounding ground could harbour several more significant gold systems, providing plenty of blue sky along the prolific Orogrande shear zone.

Having only listed on the ASX in August after a $10 million IPO, Elk Range has got off to a flying start. With visible gold now identified at depths well beyond the old drill database, a second rig churning through the metres around the clock and a potential fast-track to production in the kit bag, punters will likely be watching closely for the first results out of the lab.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@wanews.com.au