Viva Gold: New Discovery Opens Up Tonopah’s Exploration Upside

Trevor Hall (0:16)

All right, everybody, welcome back in to Mining Stock Daily. I'm picking up this corporate update, taking you all back to the great state of Nevada and the Tonopah area. It's been a while since we've gotten a corporate update from Viva Gold, but they continue to expand their Tonopah Gold Project there in Nevada. It's been an active, active summer of drilling, hitting some decent hits, but also making a new high-grade gold discovery back mid-year, back in July at Midway Hills. This allowed the company to go in and not only announce a new financing, but almost double and upsize that original financing.

So happy to welcome in Jim Hesketh from the company here, Jim, an active 2026

It's great to have positive drill results when you have a gold market that supports it. So thanks for your time. Welcome back to the pod.

Jim Hesketh (1:08)

Hey, Trevor, thanks. Thanks for having me here.

Yeah, it's been a busy summer and full spring.

Trevor Hall (1:17)

Yeah, let's take a step back and we'll talk about, let's talk about this drill campaign from the spring and into the summer heading into that discovery. What was the general strategy for this campaign before you kind of hit that huge hit at Midway Hills?

Jim Hesketh (1:34)

Yeah, well, the first 16 holes of the program was focused primarily on the main deposit. That's our resource deposit where we currently have a pre-feasibility study underway. It's primarily measured and indicated, but we were targeting still open zones within the main pit resource model as well as converting inferred material to measure and indicate it. So out of that program, out of the total of 16 holes, we had very strong hits on 12 of those holes. And a lot of the mineralization was shallow, and that converted inferred to measured and indicated. So we're having a big step up in measured and indicated material. Plus we've added additional inferred. That work on completing the new resource estimate for the main pit area is still currently underway.

The final three holes of the program was a fence of drilling. These were three holes 100 meters apart, focused in the Midway Hills portion of the project. And out of those three holes, two of them hit very strongly.

TG2617 hit 35 meters at 1.6 grams, and 2616 hit 38 meters at 0.9 grams, plus high silver grades. So that was a new discovery, and it was drilling below the historic drilling in the Midway Hills area.

Trevor Hall (3:37)

I want to talk about this Midway Hills area. You and I have chatted off and on about the project for a number of years now, Jim. Why this year? Why was this the time to finally kind of go back and test this thing at depth? Why to 2026?

Jim Hesketh (3:53)

Well, we've been telling people for years that we believe that this project has a lot more exploration upside. And it was to prove the point, to be honest. We had taken a look at the historic drilling in this area, and it was primarily conducted by Rio Algam and Canocot minerals back in the 80s and 90s. And they had been pursuing the Round Mountain model. In Round Mountain, the mineralization at Round Mountain stops when they hit the older underlying argillites. Same as our deposit. But at Round Mountain, they call that stop drill rock. When they hit that rock, they quit drilling. Well, the original people on Tonopah quit drilling when they hit the argillite.

The difference between our two deposits are, you know, they're a half-hour's drive apart, is that we do have mineralization in the main deposit, in the argillite, and it's 50% of our gold ounces are in the argillite. So we inspected the bottom of the holes from the 1980s, 1990s vintage drilling. And a lot of that, those holes had gold right in the very last intercepts. So what we did here is we took the preferred trend from the main deposit, projected it up through Midway Hills, and then drilled these three holes on the 100-meter centers. And those two big hits I mentioned earlier are 100 meters apart. I mean, that's not a small distance. So we didn't twin two holes in a discovery. We actually spread a solid discovery out, and we are planning to drill there later this year. We're just waiting on drill rigs right now.

But that will continue to expand that resource. It's a, you know, we do have some resource that we're looking at in there from the existing drilling.

And that should hit our resource statement later this year when we publish that.

Trevor Hall (6:39)

How old are those previous holes, the historical stuff?