Happy Tuesday — pour the double-double, dust off the core boxes, and let's see who hit something overnight. 🦍⛏️

One soft jobs print did what a month of Fed speeches couldn't: the US added just 57,000 jobs in June, rate-hike bets got shredded, and the whole metals board went green — gold back toward $4,180, silver punching past $62, copper firm above $6.

But the louder noise came from the rigs: Dakota Gold pulled a 77 g/t sniff out of Homestake's old neighbourhood, geophysics crews went airborne over Sweden's critical metals, and a wildfire chased the drillers off a James Bay lithium camp.

Let's dig in.

What happened: Dakota Gold $DC ( ▲ 8.7% ) wrapped its 2026 pre-feasibility drill campaign at the Richmond Hill oxide gold project in South Dakota — 17,273 m across 112 holes — and the standout, hole RH26C-432, cut 11.36 g/t gold and 14.92 g/t silver over 26.3 m, including a blistering 77.19 g/t gold over 3.2 m. A second step-out, RH26C-437, hit 2.89 g/t gold over 38.0 m. Both holes land roughly 360 m north of the current resource outline.

Why it matters: Richmond Hill sits in the Homestake district — next door to the mine that coughed up ~40 million ounces over 125 years. These aren't infill holes; they're meaningful step-outs that push high-grade mineralization well past the boundary the market is currently pricing, and they feed straight into an updated resource and a pre-feasibility study slated for Q4 2026.

What it means for your position: For a developer with a real path to production in a tier-one US jurisdiction, resource growth ahead of a PFS is the value engine — and step-outs that keep hitting are exactly how a name re-rates from "resource" to "mine."

Keep the pan handy, though: 77 g/t is a 3.2 m sliver inside a 26 m interval, not the deposit average. Richmond Hill is fundamentally a low-grade, bulk-tonnage heap-leach story, and the number that moves the needle in Q4 is the total resource and the PFS economics — not one flashy assay. Great headline grade; watch the tonnes and the strip ratio.

👉 See the assays

What happened: District Metals $DMXCF ( ▼ 1.59% ) kicked off a helicopter-borne MobileMT (mobile magnetotellurics) survey over its Alum Shale properties in Sweden — about 2,253 line-kilometres flown at 400 m spacing to map drill targets for uranium, vanadium, nickel, moly, zinc and rare earths. Up in Ontario, McLaren Resources just wrapped a drone-magnetometer survey over its McCool gold property east of Timmins.

The So What: Airborne and drone geophysics is quietly reshaping how juniors spend their first dollar. A ground crew covers maybe 8 km a day; a drone-mounted payload can pull 60 km a day — an 8x productivity jump — and a helicopter EM system reads hundreds of metres deep across a whole property in a week. For a cash-strapped explorer, that means shrinking a 10,000-hectare land package down to a handful of ranked targets before mobilizing a single rig. Targeting before drilling is the cheapest ounce a junior will ever find.

The catch: a pretty anomaly is not an orebody. Geophysics maps where the rock might be interesting; only the drill bit turns a colour blob into grade, and plenty of gorgeous MobileMT plates have led straight to dusters. It de-risks where you point the rig — it does not de-risk the rock.

👉 Read the full story

Critical Elements Lithium $CRECF ( ▲ 1.22% ) had barely rolled out plans for a 10,000 m summer drill program around its Rose West lithium discovery in Québec's Eeyou Istchee James Bay — then had to evacuate the camp and suspend all drilling as a forest fire crept toward the property.

Why it's more than a curiosity: this is the exploration risk nobody models into a target price. Fire season across the Canadian Shield has become an annual line item that torches drill plans, delays assays and burns cash while the rigs sit idle. Rose West lives in the same James Bay lithium belt as the district's marquee names, so a lost drill window there dents the whole neighbourhood's news flow.

The skeptic's shrug: an evacuation isn't a downgrade — the rock doesn't care about smoke, and drilling resumes once the fire's out. But "10,000 m planned" and "camp evacuated" in the same week is a blunt reminder that a junior's timeline is hostage to the weather, and lithium prices aren't exactly paying anyone to wait around.

👉 Read the update

That's how many jobs the US economy added in June — the smallest gain in four months, and barely half the ~110,000 economists had penciled in.

One soft payroll print did what a month of Fed jawboning couldn't: it gutted the rate-hike bets, dragged the dollar back below 101, and lit the entire metals board green in a single session. Gold, silver, copper — all bid on a number that small.

That's the tape for hump day.

Keep your grades high, your dilution low.

See you tomorrow. 🦍