While the focus has been on an eventual take-out of MMG within the Keno Hill district by Hecla, another possibility is that SNAG goes first. What follows below is an interesting analysis of SNAG by Kaiser Research:
Silver North Resources Ltd was made a Bottom-Fish Spec Value rated 2025 Favorite because results reported on November 14, 2024 for its summer drill program at the Haldane silver project in the Keno Hill district of Yukon are very significant despite being ignored by the market. At the start of 2024 Silver North had hoped to mount a $2 million program to test new targets along the West and Main Faults as well as the emerging Bighorn target in the northwestern part of Haldane. Keno Hill style high grade silver-zinc-lead mineralization occurs within jogs of the northeast oriented faults that cut through the quartzite country rock, creating intermittent high grade lenses. This is very similar to what Alexco mined at Keno Hill to the east, now owned by Hecla. The challenge is to figure out where these jogs occur and a high grade lens or shoot is present. The simplest approach is to drill lots of decently spaced holes and when mineralization is encountered drill smaller spaced holes to delineate the lens. The idea is to build up multiple high grade zones with an inventory of 30-40 million ounces silver. The exit strategy for Silver North would be a buyout from Hecla whose Keno Hill mill is under-utilized, a problem that helped sink Alexco. The story, however, could also capture the market's imagination as a silver discovery play because Haldane has the potential to host a silver endowment similar to Keno Hill. The reason this has not been confirmed by past exploration is that the surface is much more deeply oxidized which hampers finding the jogs which host the high grade lenses.
Silver North's ambitions were wrecked by the ongoing resource junior bear market which, in order to avoid hideous dilution, forced the junior to raise only enough money to fund a much smaller drill program of up to 4 holes which was done in September. That further lowered market expectations because Silver North would have to get very lucky with such a small program. Silver North hoped to leverage its program by drilling several holes designed to cut through both the West and Main Faults, plus a fourth hole in the Bighorn target to secure a better understanding of the geology in this promising new area. The West fault already has a high grade lens but past drilling on the Main had not delivered such a lens. One hole proved useless because it deviated, and the other two appear to have overshot the West fault. However, Silver North did get lucky in that these holes intersected high grade silver mineralization in the Main fault 200 m downdip and offset by 50 m from a past hole with so-so results. This even included a 1 m interval (0.73 m true width) of 2,470 g/t Ag and 9.64 g/t gold. Not only does this demonstrate that the Main fault is also fertile for high grade silver lenses that should repeat along its strike, but it gives the junior a delineation focus when it returns in July. Of course the market simply did not care that Silver North got lucky at Haldane with a minimalist drill program, so the junior will have to spend the first half of 2025 explaining the story and getting the stock price to a level where it can fund a much bigger drill program in 2025.
Silver North may get some help from the Tim project in southern Yukon optioned up to 80% to Coeur Mining which spent nearly $1 million drilling a half dozen holes for which assays are still pending at the start of 2025. Tim is a carbonate replacement type system similar to the silver-zinc-lead Silvertip deposit Coeur is mining on the BC side of the border. Coeur did allow Silver North to publish a visual description of the results in early September which revealed that Tim is indeed a CRD system with a large enough footprint to become a major discovery. Tim is about geological context, not grade, so getting assays has not been a priority, and when they arrive they are unlikely to impress the market, though Silver North is eager to see what several short mineralized intervals did assay. An important milestone will be confirmation that Coeur will return with a bigger drill program in 2025 that could deliver discovery confirming results. One future issue is that while Coeur will likely vest for 51%, the 3 year window to deliver a feasibility study to vest for 80% is not realistic in Canada's permitting environment. This does contribute to an interesting dynamic for Silver North. Coeur and Hecla are rivals which vie for the attention of silver bulls. If Haldane started to reveal that there is more potential to Haldane than just as future ore feed for Hecla's adjacent Keno Hill mill, Coeur might be keen to treat Haldane as a future potential standalone silver mine, especially if work at Tim starts to reveal that it should also own 100% of Tim rather than end up in a 51:49 relationship with possibly Hecla as a partner.