Or have investor relations contracts become a waste of money in the resource junior sector?
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Endurance Gold Corp (EDG-V) – Bottom-Fish Spec Value rated Favorite – JK owns
Endurance Gold Corp reported assays on June 23, 2025 for the first drill hole of the 2025 season on the 100% owned Reliance project in southwestern British Columbia. Hole #109 intersected 6.74 g/t gold and 0.16% antimony over 21.8 m within the Imperial Zone at 336 m depth, a very high grade interval of 54.9 g/t Au over 0.8 m at 400.7 m, and 18.9 g/t Au over 0.9 m at 534 m depth. CEO Robert Boyd, not the sort of guy inclined to use superlatives, described it as “an impressive deep drill intersection” in the news release headline. And then the rig moved to the Crown Gap area between the Imperial and Eagle Zones where three shallow holes have been completed as of June 23 for a total of 1,975 m drilled so far this season. If the results were so impressive, why move the rig to close a gap which historically has been ignored because surface values are weak in this segment of the Royal Shear trend? Was the market, despite Endurance having hired Carrie Howes’ IR firm at USD $3,500 per month on June 2 to bring the Reliance story to new audiences, right to yawn and ignore the results?
In KW Substack May 23, 2025 I provided a detailed description of the milestone timeline for the Reliance project which also articulated the purpose of each stage of this year’s drilling strategy. An updated table is located at the bottom of this comment. The market is wrong to yawn at the latest results and ignore Endurance, but doing so is understandable in light of how difficult it is for investors to understand what results mean and what happens next. Although all the reasons for a secular bull market to erupt are in place, it has not happened yet. Until a bull cycle is obvious, investors will demand a lot of contextual information about the size of the prize and the timeline for milestones that confirm or even grow it bigger.
Endurance management has become much better at articulating its objectives and the associated timeline, which I make an effort to capture and provide to my audience. We do not need to pay constant attention to a junior, just when we know a company is entering a news zone. And we need to know what to expect that counts as good or bad news. We also need to set ourselves a plausible size of the prize. I have proposed CAD $1 billion as the future value for a 1 million ounce open-pittable resource coupled with a 2 million ounce underground mineable resource. If further dilution could be avoided the target price for this outcome would be $5.03. The current $0.20 price sits within the fair value channel range for such an outcome. But if an S-Curve discovery dynamic ever sweeps into Endurance, the stock price could approach that level very quickly. Endurance Gold is ripe for S-Curve ignition.
The diagram below consists of the longitudinal and cross section of the Imperial Zone which I have annotated to illustrate what was good and so-so about hole #109. The interesting development late last year was hole #106, the deepest ever drilled at Reliance. The Imperial Zone sits at the post-mineral contact along the Royal Shear fault between the barren argillite hanging wall and the mineralized mafic volcanic footwall. Historically drill holes were stopped shortly after they exited the mineralized zone.
Hole #106 was aggressive because it extended well beyond the Imperial Zone. Near the bottom of the hole it encountered 4.47 g/t Au over 15.3 m within a gabbro unit that was much better than the 3.51 g/t Au over 6.7 m it intersected in the Imperial Zone. The Imperial Zone interval represented a 185 m down dip step out from the previous deepest hole, so the results suggested weakening mineralization. But the gabbro interval was important because it suggested the presence of stacked zones within the footwall beneath the Imperial Zone. Hole #109 was designed to cut through the middle of the 185 m gap in the Imperial Zone and intersect the gabbro unit up dip. The good news is that the gabbro was intersected 120 m up dip with a high grade interval of 18.9 g/t Au over 0.9 m. The not so good news was that the mineralized gabbro unit thins out up dip. The hope was that the Lower Imperial zone would be a reasonably thick mineralized unit that extends toward the surface, which would set the stage for drilling infill holes into the upper part of the Imperial Zone that could be pushed deep enough to intersect the Lower Imperial Zone. This is now not such a good idea.
The potential for the Lower Imperial Zone lies more at depth and along strike, which means 600+ m holes that are not a priority. The hole intersected other high grade gabbro hosted snippets in the footwall, as did hole #106. So these gabbro units are something new that needs to be tested at depth. Keep in mind that these epizonal orogenic systems can be mineralized over thousands of metres and we know from the antimony chemistry that Reliance is very high in this orogenic system, so there is plenty of room for much better results at depth. But these deep holes are expensive and take a long time to drill, and Endurance Gold has not yet caught the market’s imagination in the manner that <B>New Found Gold Corp</B> has accomplished with its Queensway project in Newfoundland where it spent $268 million on 3,214 holes totaling 723,387 m to deliver a pitiful open-pittable resource of 1,610,000 ounces at 1.9 g/t which the market is valuing at $418 million and which has recently given New Found Gold another $63 million to try to turn this sow’s ear into a purse.
The surprise in hole #109 which Robert Boyd called “impressive” was the 21.8 m of 6.74 g/t gold and 0.16% antimony Endurance intersected within the middle of the 185 down dip gap of the Imperial Zone. The Imperial Zone is not thinning at depth, but may be pulsating with thickness as one travels down dip. One might expect Endurance immediately to drill some more holes into the deeper part of the Imperial Zone, but a more important priority is the delivery of a maiden open-pittable resource estimate for the Reliance project. Another bit of good news last year was that drilling within the 300 m Crown Gap between the Imperial and Eagle zones intersected very high grades with visible gold one could see standing five ft from the core box, not some tiny speck seen with a hand lens and trumpeted as “VG”. Surface sampling had not highlighted the Crown Gap, but that might have just been a coincidence arising from the pulsating nature of the gold mineralization. At present Endurance is contemplating two elongated pits for Eagle and Imperial, and it is now rushing to drill enough shallow holes into the Crown Gap to see if it has sufficient ore grade mineralization to become part of one elongated pit. Endurance is also preparing for a metallurgical study and hopes to be able to deliver a resource estimate in early Q4 of 2025. Once the shallow Crown Gap drilling to support the resource estimate is done Endurance will move on to drilling deeper holes in the Lower Crown.
Endurance Gold Corp until recently was reluctant to do a resource estimate for an open pit scenario because management was concerned the market would conclude that the numbers represented the limits of the Reliance project. Unless there is a barnburner discovery hole the institutional audience these days is not interested in discovery-linked upside potential. By delivering a resource estimate Endurance will demonstrate tangible value for the $10 million spent since optioning Reliance in late 2019, which will become the basis for repricing the project upwards and turning that into a steppingstone for financing the bluesky that resides in chasing this orogenic gold system at depth for a substantially bigger underground mineable resource. I have set a target value of CAD $1 billion as a plausible outcome for the Royal Shear system so as to demonstrate with my IPV chart the fair value pricing potential for the Reliance story.
Although the project is at the discovery delineation stage the stock has never undergone S-Curve market action as enjoyed by New Found Gold’s Queensway project. For that to happen a substantially better interval than hitherto reported needs to show up, but for that to happen the drilling intensity needs to increase dramatically. The 25,210 m in 108 core and 84 RC holes drilled since 2020 is less than 5% of what New Found Gold drilled. The resource estimate will be an important milestone because it will bring a different deeper pocketed set of eyeballs onto the Reliance story, though a major financing at a much higher price would happen rather late in the drill season which ends in November. However, another important milestone is securing a drill permit for the Olympic portion of the Reliance project where soil sampling suggests the presence of similar parallel mineralized structures. The Olympic target area is at lower elevation than the Royal Shear zone, so a much earlier start to drilling in 2026 is conceivable. For now consider the IPV chart for a CAD $1 billion outcome which shows Reliance with a $40 million implied value that represents fair speculative value while New Found Gold’s Queensway project which is now at the resource estimate completed stage sports a $418 million implied value, ten times that of Reliance. Robert Boyd made an interesting comment about the Royal Shear: “it’s hard to hit nothing”. Imagine if Endurance had a budget to drill 25,000 metres in one year.
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About John Kaiser
John Kaiser is a highly regarded authority in the global resource sector, particularly respected for his thoughtful analysis of Canadian and Australian resource companies—especially junior explorers and developers. Based in Vancouver, John earned a Bachelor’s in Philosophy and German from the University of British Columbia in 1982.
He founded Kaiser Research Online and subsequently launched Kaiser Watch, a two-tiered platform offering:
- Kaiser Watch General (free): Broad commentary on market trends and sector-wide developments
- Kaiser Watch Specific (subscription): Deep-dive reports and company-by-company narratives tailored to the high-risk, high-reward nuances of junior resource stocks
With over 25 years of experience, he is frequently recognized for his rigorous, independent commentary, grounding investors in clear, data-driven insights. John also extends his influence through regular audio and video segments — such as the weekly Kaiser Watch shows co-hosted with Jim Goddard — as well as contributions to online publications.
Passionate about transparency and rooted in a deep understanding of grassroots resource exploration, John empowers self-directed investors to navigate the junior resource space with greater clarity and confidence.
You can reach John Kaiser on X (formerly Twitter) at @KaiserResearch or through his website at kaiserresearch.com.
Disclaimer
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. John Kaiser has granted permission for publication and no fees were paid. John Kaiser owns shares in Endurance Gold Corp (TSXV: EDG). MiningIR and affiliated entities may also hold positions in companies discussed. Before publishing this article, neither John Kaiser nor MiningIR received compensation from any company profiled herein. Readers should assume potential conflicts of interest and conduct their own due diligence. Investing involves risk.
