The playbook — silver · September 8, 2026
Silver47 drills 197 m of sulfide at Second Chance — assays pending
The widest hole ever on the Red Mountain project is a visual call. No grades yet, and a Bunker Hill merger is running in the background.
Silver47 finished its 2026 summer drilling at the Red Mountain project in Alaska’s Bonnifield district — 4,136 metres across 14 holes on five targets — and led with a number that sounds enormous. Hole SC26-003 at a new zone called Second Chance cut 197 metres of continuous sulfide, including 74 metres of semi-massive to massive sulfide. That is the widest intercept ever drilled on the property. Here is the catch, stated plainly because the geologist insists on it: every one of those Red Mountain numbers is a visual call. Someone looked at the core and estimated sulfide by eye. No assays. No grades. Not yet.
That distinction is the whole story. Sulfide you can see is mostly pyrite — fool’s gold, common barren rock that carries no silver, zinc or lead. What pays the bills is sphalerite and galena, and those show up here only as minor visual estimates. So the gram-meter math — grade times width, the yardstick for whether an intercept means anything — can’t even be run. The only actual assays in the release come from the separate Mogollon property, and they are slivers: 303 grams per tonne silver-equivalent over 0.3 metres, and 169 grams over 1.7 metres. Narrow epithermal vein, not the wide VMS system the headline is selling. The team is led by Executive Chairman Gary Thompson, a geologist of 25-plus years who also runs Brixton Metals, and CEO Galen McNamara, a P.Geo. formerly of Summa Silver. The market has been paying attention regardless: the stock rose 30% over three months while silver itself fell 2.3% and junior silver peers gained 21% — a nine-point lead over the sector that came from company-specific news, not a commodity tailwind.
What to watch is simple: the assays. The company promises a “steady flow of results as assays are received,” with no date. Until those land, the 197-metre package is a geometry, not a grade — and true width was not stated for any hole, so a 197-metre core length drilled at a steep angle likely overstates real thickness by a lot. Second Chance is five holes over roughly 200 metres of strike with one standout, which means isolation risk if the step-outs don’t repeat. Running underneath all of it: Silver47 is mid-merger with Bunker Hill Mining, shareholder votes the arrangement agreement targets by mid-November, a live deal that rewards a high asset value.