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Nobody had ever drilled at Andrei before this summer. Seven holes later, Enduro Metals says the target holds two separate types of mineral system — and the more interesting one appears to get stronger the deeper you go.
The company's August 24 release said the 2,700-metre inaugural program at Andrei tested two concentrations of elevated ground response within a combined geological anomaly stretching more than four kilometres across its Newmont Lake property in northern British Columbia. Both systems turned up in the northeast portion of that anomaly — the area the company now considers the more prospective of the two.
The first system is a porphyry: a copper-gold deposit type that forms deep underground when metal-bearing fluids crystallise inside an intrusive rock body. Hole AD-03 cut porphyry-style alteration and quartz-sulphide veining that grew more abundant with depth, a pattern that suggests the core of the system lies further down or to one side. The hole was stopped at 491 metres because of drilling conditions, with the mineralisation still intensifying. The company says the system remains open to the northeast and southeast.
The second system is a different animal. Holes AD-04 and AD-06 both intersected low-sulphidation epithermal-style veining and breccias — a shallower, lower-temperature type of gold-bearing mineralisation that forms in fractured rock closer to the surface, often near past volcanic activity. AD-04 hit an interval of intense veining and broken rock between 63 metres and 92 metres downhole before faulting closed the hole at 192 metres. AD-06 found a similar interval much deeper, between 436 metres and 444 metres, before drilling difficulties ended that hole too.
Both systems in the same target, at different depths, is structurally unusual. What that means for grade and width is unknown: all assay results are still pending, and the company says it expects them later in the year. Until those numbers arrive, the geological observations carry no economic weight. The holes are mapped; the rock has been logged; nothing has been valued.
The southwest portion of the target produced less. The four holes drilled there each hit mineralisation that either faded with depth or was displaced by faults. The company also noted that the program came in shorter than originally planned, citing difficult drilling conditions and limited availability of drill-contractor personnel.
Phase 2 work is already under way. Enduro's next step at Andrei is a planned 20-line-kilometre induced polarisation survey — a geophysical technique that measures how rock responds to electrical current and is used here to extend coverage northeast of where the 2026 holes ended. That is the direction the porphyry system appears to be pointing.
CEO Robert Cameron said in the release that the pending assay results, combined with the upcoming survey data, "will help us refine our geological model and prioritise the next phase of exploration at Andrei." The assays are the next material event for this target, and the company has not said when exactly they will be received.