The playbook — gold · October 19, 2026
McFarlane Lake funds a 50,000-metre drill program at Juby
Three drills, C$17.25M behind them, aimed at a big low-grade Abitibi gold resource. No new assays yet — a scoping study is the next real test.
McFarlane Lake Mining says it has fully funded a 50,000-metre Phase 2 drilling program at its Juby Gold Project near Gowganda, Ontario, in the southern Abitibi greenstone belt. The company says three drills are expected on site before November 1. Behind the plan sits the C$17.25 million bought-deal financing that closed in September. This is a program announcement, not a results release — there are no new drill holes or assays to read here.
What Juby already carries is a filed NI 43-101 resource, effective August 14, 2026, prepared by BBA E&C Inc.: 1.07 million ounces of gold in the Indicated category at 0.96 grams per tonne, and 5.09 million ounces Inferred at 0.87 grams per tonne — under one gram of gold in every tonne of rock. Those are large-tonnage, low-grade numbers, the kind an open pit lives or dies on. The resource uses a 0.25 g/t cut-off for open pit and 1.60 g/t underground, at an assumed gold price of US$3,600 an ounce — well above long-run consensus, so the ounce count is sensitive to that input. CEO Mark Trevisiol, who founded the company and owns about 7% of it, spent two decades at Falconbridge and Xstrata Nickel before running two prior public explorers; neither tenure shows a mine built or a clean exit on the public record. The stock is up 39.7% over three months against GDXJ’s 18.3% and gold’s 3.6% — more than double the junior sector, on company-specific newsflow rather than the metal price.
The stated catalysts are concrete: three drills deployed by November 1, early-stage metallurgical testwork concluding late in Q4 2026, a scoping study initiated this quarter with results targeted by the end of Q2 2027, and an advanced exploration closure plan to regulators in Q1 2027. Read the caveats alongside them. The resource leans heavily on Inferred ounces — 5.09 million of the 6.16 million total — and Inferred resources cannot underpin an economic study and may not convert at full tonnage or grade. The scoping study, not this release, is where those economics first get tested. A geophysical corridor running about 1.6 km northwest toward Golden Lake is described by the company itself as an untested anomaly that still needs drilling, not a proven link between deposits.