Kodiak's first Ketchan hole hits 283.5 m of copper-gold

Kodiak Copper reported the first drill results from Ketchan, a copper-gold deposit at its MPD project in southern British Columbia. One hole did the heavy lifting. AG-26-019 cut 0.70% copper-equivalent over 283.5 metres — a fat slab of mineralized rock — starting just 37.5 metres below surface. Inside that run sat a 108-metre core grading 1.02% copper-equivalent, tied to a hydrothermal breccia (rock shattered and re-cemented by hot mineral-bearing fluids). The other seven holes were quieter: two came back essentially barren, four sat below 0.25% copper-equivalent, and a couple — AG-26-009 and AG-26-003 — landed somewhere in between.

Here’s why the width matters. In a copper-gold porphyry, you don’t count grams per tonne of gold — you measure copper-equivalent grade across long stretches, because a future mine would dig a big pit and chew through everything. AG-26-019 runs roughly double the typical grade for this district, and it’s near surface, which is exactly the geometry a pit wants. The company chairing this is Chris Taylor, who founded Great Bear Resources and sold it to Kinross for C$1.8 billion; CEO Claudia Tornquist came from Rio Tinto and Sandstorm. Copper miner Teck holds a stake, now reported around 8.4%. The 2026 program is described as fully funded after a C$10M raise. The stock rose 8.1% over three months — nearly matching copper’s own 8.4% move, while the copper-miner index ran 20.1%. So far the market is treating Kodiak as a copper proxy, not a discovery story.

Now the honest part. The company states plainly that drilling to date is insufficient to determine the true width of mineralization — the reported lengths are downhole core intervals and may overstate how thick the zone really is. This is a single-hole release: AG-26-019 dominates, and these were infill holes drilled inside the existing resource block, not step-outs proving new ground. The southern-extension holes — the ones that would test new scale — are still pending, and the soil data pointing there hasn’t been independently validated. The copper-equivalent figures also lean on assumed recoveries and elevated metal prices, and are labeled for comparison only. Watch for the balance of Ketchan assays in coming weeks, completion of the 16,500-metre program into Q4 2026 per the company’s current schedule, and an updated resource estimate the company targets for Q1 2027.

Public sources: source 1source 2source 3source 4source 5source 6