NV Gold hits thick, low-grade gold at Awakening — and the stock has run 309%

NV Gold says it has found a new gold zone at the Awakening area of its Slumber project in Nevada. The headline number came from hole SL-42, which cut 41.14 metres grading 0.844 grams of gold per tonne — a bit under a gram of gold in every tonne of rock, over a stretch running from 158.5 to 199.64 metres down the hole (vertical depths of approximately 137 to 173 metres). Inside that run was a richer 21.34-metre band at 1.0 gram per tonne, plus a shallow oxide slice near surface: 50 metres at 0.42 grams per tonne, from 6 to 56 metres down. A second hole, SL-38, hit 47.25 metres at 0.655 grams per tonne and ended in mineralization because the ground caved.

Here is the logic. This is a bulk-tonnage story, not a high-grade one — think broad widths of sub-gram material, the kind you mine cheaply by piling crushed rock on a pad and rinsing the gold out (heap leach), and only if there is a lot of it. The gram-metre scores — grade times thickness — land at 21 to 35, which is modest. The interest is in thickness and consistency, not richness. SL-42 was collared about 250 metres south of SL-38, and both cut thick mineralization at similar down-dip depths, roughly 137 to 202 metres below surface. That supports the idea of one large silicified system running between them. The oxidation reaching to 200 metres and the planned met testing are the right questions for a heap-leach concept. CEO John Watson built and ran two Nevada heap-leach mines at Horizon Gold from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, so the playbook is familiar to him. And the market has noticed: NVX is up 309% over three months against a 26% rise in the junior gold index and gold’s 4% gain — roughly twelve times the sector move, a company-specific re-rating.

Now the honest part. The gap between SL-38 and SL-42 is still untested — the two intervening holes, SL-39 and SL-39A, both stopped short of target in broken ground and their assays are pending. The 41-metre intercept in SL-42 (158.5–199.64m) is fully reported, but a deeper additional interval from 655 to 735 feet has not yet been assayed due to a lab delay; the company says those results will be reported in a subsequent press release. True widths are unknown; the company says only that they are likely 70% to 100% of core length, an estimate, not a survey. Just three of six initial holes have been reported in a program the company expects to run to 25 to 30 additional holes and continue to November or later, so these results could still turn out isolated. Slumber has no mineral resource after four campaigns since 2019. Watch for the missing assays, the rest of the drilling, and the met tests.

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