The playbook — gold · September 15, 2026
Apollo's pit halo: broad, shallow, and mostly low-grade
Six-for-six above cutoff in ground Collective had modeled as waste — one silver-rich hole carries the headline, the rest run ordinary.
On September 15, 2026, Collective Mining reported drill holes that hit inside ground it had already written off. The rock sits within the open-pit shell of the Apollo deposit in Colombia — but in areas the company’s own model had marked as waste. The headline number is 135.15 metres at 2.12 grams per tonne gold-equivalent, starting just 21.30 metres below surface. Six holes in this Southern halo zone all came back above the 0.3 gram-per-tonne cutoff — the grade a tonne of rock has to clear to count as ore. This follows our last entry, when Apollo posted its first resource of 5.4 million ounces. That entry left assays from the Northern Breccia and Ramp Zone holes pending; those specific results are not in this release, and remain open. The company says the Guayabales adit build is still slated for Q4 2026.
Here is why it matters, and where the headline gets thinner. This is not new discovery — it is conversion. Turning modeled waste into resource ounces can shrink Apollo’s 3.4-to-1 strip ratio, meaning less waste rock dug per tonne of ore. But read the headline hole closely: that 2.12 grams per tonne is mostly silver, not gold. Gold alone in APC-182 runs just 0.28 grams per tonne; 90 grams per tonne of silver, converted at an assumed US$60 per ounce, does the heavy lifting. Of the six holes, only APC-182 clears about 0.7 gram-per-tonne gold-equivalent — the other five run 0.3 to 0.7, routine numbers next to a proven 5.4-million-ounce deposit. This is the team that built Continental Gold and sold it to Zijin for approximately $1.4 billion in enterprise value, with Agnico Eagle as the sole disclosed strategic holder. Yet the stock fell 14% over three months while the junior gold index rose 8.3% and gold sat flat — a company-specific gap, not a sector story.
What to watch, and the honest limits. True widths are given only as a blanket 60% to 100% of core length, so that 135.15-metre interval could be as little as roughly 81 metres of real thickness. The high-grade transition lens rests on one hole, so isolation risk is real. The claim that the halo runs beyond the pit shell leans on a single thin intercept — APC-164D, 52.1 metres at 0.33 gold-equivalent, stated about 120 metres northeast of the pit outline, between 88.2 and 140.3 metres down the hole — cited as evidence the zone extends along an interpreted 2,400-metre strike. That is one thin hole carrying a long claim. Ahead: roughly 42,000 metres of drilling since the resource cutoff still awaits assays, first results from the Orion target, and Victory drilling in Q4 2026.