New Galena vein grades 1,062 g/t silver — market stays wary

Americas Gold and Silver pulled a fistful of very high-grade silver hits from three mines at its Galena Complex in Idaho’s Silver Valley, an operating district. The company’s own release title states the headline hole cut 1.3 metres grading 1,062 grams of silver per tonne — more than a kilogram of silver in every tonne of rock — plus 0.7% copper, from a brand-new vein at the Galena mine. (The release is internally inconsistent here: the CEO quote in the same release describes that hole, 49-817, as 1.2 metres of 1,061 grams per tonne, and the dossier geologist logs it as 1.2 metres at 1,061 grams per tonne. The full assay table sits in an external file we could not verify.) At the Crescent mine, drilling returned 1,891 grams per tonne over 1.3 metres and 1,560 grams per tonne over 1.1 metres. These are not one lucky hole: the batch spans Galena, Coeur and Crescent and includes genuinely new veins — the 9 Vein, a 49-level discovery, and two veins near Alhambra at Crescent.

Here’s the mechanic that matters. The company states these are estimated true widths — the honest way to report, because it measures the rock as a miner would drill through it, and most explorers quietly skip this. So the grades are believable. But nearly every hit is narrow, from 0.1 to 2.3 metres, so the story is grade and vein count, not thickness. Multiply grade by width and you get gram-metres, a rough measure of how much metal a hole found: the numbers run from 432 up to 4,025, with most sitting strong to exceptional. At Coeur, hole C034-188 expanded the 520 Vein by 45 metres up-dip of an earlier hole (C034-166), and the combined vein now measures 200 metres long by 200 metres high and stays open — real scale as the company works toward converting these veins into a formal resource. The release does not state how far below surface these intercepts sit, so depth can’t be quoted. Paul Andre Huet, who sold Klondex to Hecla and merged Karora into Westgold, runs the show; Eric Sprott is the largest shareholder at roughly 14%. Despite the grades, the stock fell 4.7% over three months while junior silver peers rallied about 7.6% and silver itself ticked up 1.1% — the market is applying a company-specific discount.

Watch the caveats, because they’re the point. Several bonanza grades sit on widths of 0.1 to 0.4 metres, below the minimum you can practically mine, so the metal is real but the mineable volume is uncertain. No cut-off grade or compositing interval was disclosed, so the waste rock between highlighted hits can’t be judged. Crescent has reported only 12 of 45 holes; 33 assays are still pending. The named qualified person, Rick Streiff, is a consultant, not stated as independent. The company says an updated Crescent resource and a mine plan are both targeted for 2027, ahead of first mining there.

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