The playbook — gold · September 24, 2026
Independence confirms Balrog vein at depth, hits gold-silver at Tommy
Three holes at the 3Ts project: shallow infill at Tommy plus the first drill test below the Balrog sill, as the stock nearly doubles.
Independence Gold reported results from three drill holes at its 3Ts gold-silver project in British Columbia, 16 kilometres from the Blackwater Mine. Two holes were infill drilling at the Tommy vein — filling gaps inside ground the company already counts as a resource. The best of these returned 3.11 grams of gold per tonne over 8.03 metres, plus 48.69 grams of silver per tonne over that same width. A second Tommy hole hit a narrow but rich streak: 19.62 grams of gold per tonne over 1.57 metres. The third hole, at a target called Balrog, was the first ever drilled beneath the microdiorite sill — a sheet of harder rock capping the area — and hit five thin gold intervals.
The headline widths are longer than the real gold. The company discloses that true width — the honest thickness of the vein once you account for the angle the drill cut through it — is 50% of the reported interval at the best Tommy hole. So that 8.03-metre hit is really about 4 metres of vein, carrying roughly 12.5 gram-metres of gold (grade times true width, the standard yardstick). The Balrog holes matter for a different reason: they indicate the vein continues below the sill, with intercepts between about 64 and 84 metres below surface; the release does not state how far laterally the zone was extended from prior drilling. That is a geological idea confirmed, not a payload — those five intervals are all thin, 0.80 to 2.70 metres, and low grade, 0.54 to 2.24 grams per tonne. The work is signed off by Andrew Randell, an independent qualified person, with assays run at accredited lab SGS Canada. Over the past three months the stock rose 89.5% while the junior gold index gained 24.3% and gold itself rose 7.6% — roughly 3.7 times the peer move, and the sparkline shows a discrete step up rather than a slow drift.
The caveats are worth keeping. The true-width figures are blanket ratios applied across each hole, not hole-by-hole modelled geometry, so the headline lengths overstate the real zone by roughly 1.5 to 2 times. The company did not state its cut-off grade or compositing interval. The Balrog depth intervals confirm continuity, not tonnage. And only three holes were reported — the two Tommy holes are infill, adding no strike length or resource expansion. Independence says a fall program of soil sampling, trenching and prospecting begins within 10 days, with a Q4 2026 drill program to follow targeting new vein systems and depth extensions.