| New York spot gold lost $7.40 Thursday, ending the day at $1,776.50. The TSX Venture Exchange moved higher, ending the day up 9.63 points to 930.63, while the TSX gold index fell 1.80 points to 313.11. Most Canadian gold miners were silent today -- today being Friday and all -- so they drifted lower with bullion for the most part. Torex Gold Resources Inc. (TXG), down 80 cents to $17.04 on 538,000 shares yesterday on word it is building a solar electric plant at its ELG mine in Mexico, led the retreat again today, dropping another 46 cents to $16.58 on 591,000 shares. Going the other way was Newmont Corp. (NGT), which will reveal its first quarter results in a week. It added 14 cents to $82.01 on 293,000 shares today. Richard Penn's Black Tusk Resources Inc. (TUSK) closed unchanged at four cents on 566,000 shares. The company said midday yesterday that it has drilled a one-metre interval averaging 1.185 grams of gold per tonne at its McKenzie East project, north of Val d'Or in Quebec. The assays, from the first four holes drilled this year, were disappointing, with three of the holes producing just modest amounts of gold over narrow widths and the fourth failing to hit mineralization. In the absence of promotable results from standard assays, Mr. Penn, chairman and chief executive officer, pointed to metallics assays from one of the tests that had contained visible gold. A 0.61-metre interval containing the eyeballed gold averaged just 0.61 gram per tonne using standard testing, but the coarse-gold content was 8.01 grams per tonne. Meanwhile, assays for the other four holes drilled in the eight-hole, 2,584-metre drill program are pending. This is the much-ballyhooed drill program that Mr. Penn began promoting incessantly last May, and which finally got under way in mid-January. The usual market enthusiasm accompanying a drill campaign launched by a five-center prodded Black Tusk as high as nine cents by mid-February as over 12 million shares traded on just one day, but it has been a downhill slide since then on decreasing volume. Mr. Penn avoided offering the customary quotes about these initial assays, but he was a chatty Cathy in mid-February when Black Tusk was finishing its third hole of the program. He was "encouraged by the positive results" obtained to that point, although he conceded that the extent of the gold mineralization was "still to be determined" by the coming assays. When Black Tusk acquired McKenzie East in the fall of 2019 for five million shares, it hyped the play by its proximity to the McKenzie Break project, then operated by Jean-Marc Lacoste's Monarch Gold Corp., just two kilometres to the west. McKenzie Break hosts 1.93 million tonnes indicated and 3.33 million tonnes inferred at grades sufficient to provide 250,000 ounces of gold. That was enough for Mr. Penn to cheer his McKenzie East project as an area play, but McKenzie Break was deemed not worth keeping when Yamana Gold Inc. (YRI: $5.94) acquired Monarch early this year. Instead, the project was spun off, along with a few other castaways, as Mr. Lacoste's Monarch Mining Corp. (GBAR: $0.82). Now, with drilling at McKenzie East finally complete and with half the assays now in hand, Mr. Penn is uncustomarily quiet about the plan from here. He and his crew do say that, once the rest of the assays are back from the lab and tabulated, they will "undertake in-depth interpretation" -- words that usually translate to "look for enough glimmers of hope to keep the project going." James Rogers's Clarity Gold Corp. (CLAR) lost 11 cents to $1.34 on 194,000 shares. Clarity said, rather opaquely, that it has "processed and dispatched" samples from about 2,300 metres of drill core recovered from its Destiny project in the Abitibi region of Quebec. The company had processed the rock -- logging and splitting, basically -- but the lab must now do its own processing before there are any assays to cheer. Most of the rock off for assay came from infill drilling, a part of the 10,000-metre drill program that also includes extension drilling at depth in the Gap zone. Mr. Rogers, CEO, says that all the holes drilled so far have encountered mineralization at or near expected depths -- these are infill holes, remember -- and he and his crew are now eagerly awaiting the assays. Previous results included hits of up to 167 grams per tonne over one metre, with a more substantial interval averaging 6.15 grams per tonne over 23.6 metres. This is Clarity's first drill program at Destiny, as it acquired an option to earn a 100-per-cent interest in the project late last year from Big Ridge Gold Corp. (BRAU: $0.14). At the time, Big Ridge was touting an indicated resource of 360,000 ounces and another 247,000 ounces inferred, so the acquisition does not come cheaply: Clarity must make staged payments of $3-million in cash and $5.5-million in shares over a three-year period. |