Collective Mining has officially announced initial assay results for the first of a planned series involving orthogonally drilled holes that, on their part, are designed to test the potential of newly modeled broad and high-grade subzones within the Apollo system.
To give you some context, the company presently has four drill rigs operating as part of its fully funded and on-schedule 40,000-metre drilling program for 2024. Beyond that, a fully funded 60,000-metre drill program is already planned for 2025 which, by the way, will also be the largest drilling campaign in the history of Collective Mining.
Anyway, talk about the published assay results on a slightly deeper level, we begin from how they reveal 534.40 metres @ 2.70 g/t gold equivalent from 107.10 metres. This includes 150.55 metres @ 6.16 g/t gold equivalent from 107.10 metres
Next up, we must dig into how these results claim that the drilled hole. Named APC104-D1, brings the largest grade accumulation intercepted to date at Apollo, reporting 1,440 g/t gold equivalent on a gram x meter basis. For better understanding, we must acknowledge that grade accumulation in APC104-D1 at 1,440 g/t gold equivalent is almost 38% higher than the average of 1,055 g/t gold equivalent for the prior fourteenth grade accumulation intercepts at over 1,000 g/t gold equivalent drilled by the company.
Not just largest, but APC104-D1 is also the first hole within a newly designed large drilling program, which is geared towards defining and extending the high-grade subzones to depth at Apollo. In case that wasn’t enough, then you ought to know that even the visual logging of recently completed drill holes i.e. APC104-D2 and APC104-D3 indicate that both holes have intersected the same styles of mineralization and sulphide levels as reported in APC104-D1.
“Internal deposit modeling led to the realization that most of the prior drilling from the south was not directly orthogonally across the system and that we should start drilling from the northern side of Apollo in a southerly pattern. As a result, drill Pad17 was constructed, and the hypothesis was tested with hole APC104-D1. 2025 is going to be an exciting year for the Company as we focus drilling on chasing laterally and vertically both the high-grade subzones and Ramp Zone as part of our fully funded, 60,000-metre drill program,” said Ari Sussman, Executive Chairman at Collective Mining.
Moving on, Collective Mining would go on to reveal how high-grade intercepts within Apollo have now been sparsely drilled from surface down to 1,150 metres below surface. The deepest intercept here would be the recent discovery of Ramp Zone which returned an intercept of 57.65 metres @ 8.18 g/t gold equivalent.
Ramp Zone happens to be located close in elevation to the conceptual underground haulage tunnel for a future mine at the Guayabales Project. It also shares a fair few geological characteristics with Aris Mining’s multi-million-ounce Marmato Deeps deposit located only 1.75 kilometres southeast of Apollo. Currently, the drilling at the Ramp Zone is ongoing, with assay results anticipated in early Q1, 2025.
Beyond that, Collective Mining’s latest report also revealed that broad mineralized interval of APC104-D1 has expanded the Apollo system southwestwards by 30 metres. Complementing the same would be how a new zone of mineralization located outside of the breccia body in country rock showcased 20.10 metres @ 1.23 g/t gold equivalent and bottomed in mineralization at the end of the hole.
