Bob Archer, President and CEO of Pinnacle Silver & Gold (TSX-V:PINN) (OTC: PSGCF), joins me to unpack the upcoming initial Phase 1 drill program, along with the big picture development roadmap towards near-term production in 2 years at the Company’s El Potrero Gold-Silver Project in Durango, Mexico.
The El Potrero Project contains a low-sulphidation epithermal gold-silver system that has been traced for more than 1,600 metres along strike and 500 metres in width in the northern part of the property. Pinnacle’s geological team has been conducting extensive and systematic surface and underground mapping and sampling comprising 1,196 samples in 2025.
Pinnacle recently conducted an airborne LiDAR survey across the entire 11 km2 property, from which 64 adits, 6 shafts and 51 prospecting pits were interpreted by a leading consultant in this field. While many of these lie along the Dos de Mayo vein structure in the northern 10% of the property, confirming the trend, most of the remainder lie on the other 90% that has yet to be explored.
This Phase 1 program will be a number of shorter 20-25meter holes piercing the walls and ceilings at approximately 6 priority targets initially, with many more targets identified. There will also be surface drilling incorporated in tandem, once the underground drilling is well underway. The Phase 1 exploration will focus on 2 of the 3 historic mining areas: the Dos de Mayo and Pinos Cuates initially. In future phases of exploration the company will also explore the third historic mining area around La Dura.
Bob also outlines the vision to rapidly move from exploration, to development, with a goal to first production in about 2 years. There are distinct advantages to having a brownfields site with underground development already in place and an existing processing plant on site, that is estimated to be capable of processing about 100 tonnes per day utilising crushing, milling, vat leach and Merrill Crowe circuits. The plant will need new equipment, but Pinnacle has cleaned up the plant site and surrounding infrastructure and conducted a preliminary assessment of the cost to rebuild the plant and install a dry-stack tailings facility.
The company has undergone initial metallurgical testing with three samples taken from underground at the historic Pinos Cuates mine, the central of the three main mines on the Dos de Mayo structure, and sent to SGS Durango for preliminary test work. Given that these were preliminary tests, there was no optimization, yet the results from leach tests indicated gold recoveries ranging from 92.81% to 96.79% and averaging 95.09%. Silver recoveries were lower and more variable, due to more complex mineralogy, and ranged from 41.41% to 73.53%, averaging 54.68%. Mineralogical studies and further optimization will be required to obtain consistently higher silver recoveries.
The Company is currently closing a C$2.52M financing to cover both the underground and surface programs through 2026. Down the road, Pinnacle also envisions an off-take agreement that will help bring in non-dilutive capital to fund the initial capex for plant refurbishment, underground development work, extending the powerline to grid access, and for working capital.
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