The playbook — silver · October 19, 2026
Capitan pushes silver 600 m deeper and flags a new CRD overprint
At Cruz de Plata in Durango, the deepest hole carries 959 g/t silver plus copper, and a higher-temperature system shows up across several holes.
Capitan Silver released drill results from Cruz de Plata, its silver-gold project in Durango, Mexico, and did two things at once. It pushed a known silver zone about 600 metres down-dip — the deepest intercept yet — and it announced a new CRD discovery, meaning a copper-lead-zinc-bearing style of mineralization sitting on top of the silver. The deepest hole, 26-ERDD-49, returned 0.9 metres grading 959 grams of silver per tonne plus 2.72% copper, with the deepest copper intercept at 436.7 m downhole; up-dip on the same section, 26-ERDD-32 intersected the same system at ~191–226 m downhole, with the ~600 m of down-dip separation between the two holes defining the extent of the extension. The silver-equivalent grade for the deepest 0.9 m slice in 26-ERDD-49 ran to 1,639.3 g/t, inside a wider 9.3-metre envelope at 155.4 g/t. These are downhole lengths, not true thicknesses.
The mechanism is what makes this a scale story. A CRD — carbonate replacement deposit — is a higher-temperature system that can be large and rich; finding a credible CRD signature at a silver project widens the target. The release says the system is being traced along a 2,850-metre trend, with step-outs of 60 to 80 metres and the deepest intercept roughly 600 metres down-dip. The CRD evidence spans several holes plus historic drilling, which lowers single-hole risk. The headline silver numbers are genuinely high, but mostly over thin slices — 0.3 to 1.4 metres — so the more meaningful figures are the 4-to-9-metre envelopes running ~90 to 330 g/t silver-equivalent. CEO Alberto Orozco was exploration director at Argonaut Gold, later bought by Alamos for US$325 million. The stock rose 13.8% over three months while silver barely moved (+1.5%) and the junior silver index gained 8.2% — company-specific demand, not just a rising silver tide.
Now the caveats, because they are the whole job. All headline grades are silver-equivalent, a combined metric blending silver, gold, copper, lead and zinc; underlying silver grades are provided for each hole. True widths are not disclosed, so for steep zones the real thickness may be materially less. Cut-off grade, compositing rules and QA/QC methods are absent from the text. The CRD “discovery” rests on logging and core photos, not a modeled body, so continuity between those intercepts is interpretive and needs infill. Capitan has no resource estimate on file. Next up: assays from 80 pending holes — 22 core, 58 RC — arriving weekly across priority and newly permitted targets.