The playbook — gold · September 2, 2026
Mirado West step-out doubles Kirkland Lake footprint to 1,300 m
A broad near-surface hole extends gold 600 m west in a proven camp — while the stock sank as the junior gold index rallied.
Kirkland Lake Discoveries drilled a hole that cut 1.22 grams of gold per tonne over 69.5 metres near surface — modest grade, but a lot of it, roughly the length of a soccer pitch of gold-bearing rock starting close to the top. Inside that run sat a richer 12-metre core grading 5.67 grams per tonne. The hole, called KLM26-037, landed at a brand-new zone the company named Mirado West, about 600 metres west of the known deposit. That extends the mineralized trend to over 1,300 metres — double the previous footprint — on ground 18 kilometres south of Kirkland Lake, Ontario, one of Canada’s most productive gold camps.
The relevant metric here is gram-metres: grade times width. This hole delivers about 85 of them, a solid number that says the zone has real scale, even if the grade is ordinary for the district. A second hole, KLM26-035, was mostly weak — much of it under 0.4 grams per tonne — with one dramatic 36.72-gram-per-tonne sliver over just 1.01 metres. That figure looks spectacular but carries almost no contained metal; it’s a splinter, not a seam. The value here is geometry, not bonanza grade: the company is stretching a known system across a proven camp. The company’s executive chair is Denis Laviolette, a recognizable capital-markets name, who co-founded New Found Gold; CEO Stefan Sklepowicz comes from operations roles and has no public record of building or selling a mine. The market has been unimpressed regardless — the stock fell 13.3% over three months while the junior gold index rose 9.5%, a gap of more than twenty points that the data show is not explained by sector movement alone.
Now the honesty. These are two holes, drilled from a single pad in opposite directions, which makes the geometry genuinely uncertain. The broad KLM26-037 intercept has no neighbour yet to confirm it. True width was not disclosed — the reported lengths are core lengths and may overstate the real thickness of the zone. The link to the historical Mirado deposit is interpreted, not yet demonstrated by continuous drilling. And there is no NI 43-101 resource estimate for Mirado. Nineteen more holes are pending assay across Mirado North and South, four more at Mirado West, and six regional targets. Those results, timing unstated, are what turn a step-out into a story.