🦍 Wednesday, July 8, 2026 — the junior resource daily

Happy Wednesday! ☕ Pour the double-double, blow the dust off the core boxes, and let's talk about the hole that just printed the richest metre in its mine's hundred-year history.

Gold's catching its breath around $4,150 while the whole desk waits on the Fed minutes, silver took a step back, and copper keeps grinding higher.

Quiet tape up top, loud drill core down below.

Snapshot: Tuesday, July 7 close.

What happened: Radisson Mining ($$RMRDF ( ▲ 2.05% )) reported the highest drill assay in O'Brien's entire history — 1,603.95 g/t gold over 1.0 metre, sitting inside a still-ridiculous 316.31 g/t Au over 5.1 metres. The hole, OB-26-385W4, was chasing the deep extension of the vein system beneath the old O'Brien Mine East workings in Québec's Abitibi. It's one of three holes released from an ongoing 140,000-metre step-out program.

Why it happened: O'Brien was one of the highest-grade past-producers in the Abitibi, and Radisson has been methodically drilling below and around the historic mine to prove the veins keep going at depth. This hole says they do — and then some. That 1.6 kg/t number is the kind of intercept that makes a geologist spill their coffee.

What it means for your position: Bonanza grade sells the story, but keep the skeptic's hat on. 1,604 g/t over a single metre is a nugget-effect showstopper — high-grade gold veins are notoriously spotty, and one spectacular metre doesn't build a mine. The number that actually matters is the 316 g/t over 5.1 m (still world-class) and, more importantly, whether these deep veins show continuity hole-to-hole. This is a resource-growth-and-grade story, not a shovel-ready one — watch the step-out spacing and the eventual resource update, not the headline gram count.

👉 See the assays

Cascade Copper ($$CASC.CSE ( 0.0% )) dropped an update on its maiden drill program at the Centrefire copper-gold project near Dryden, NW Ontario — but the interesting part isn't the first hole, it's how they picked where to put it. Cascade is running 3D inversion modelling of geophysics, LiDAR elevation models, and AI-enhanced predictive modelling over every scrap of historic and modern data before the rig moves.

That's the trend worth watching: exploration is quietly becoming a software problem before it's a drilling problem. Machine-learning platforms that used to be a major-miner luxury are now off-the-shelf for juniors — data-fusion tools that stack geophysics, geochem, satellite imagery, and old drill logs to rank targets. More than 60% of junior copper explorers said they'd adopt AI-driven targeting; the shovel budget follows the algorithm now.

The skeptic's footnote: a beautifully modelled anomaly is still just an anomaly. The AI narrows the odds — it doesn't assay the rock. Cascade's priority hole CF-26-01 has its results pending; the model gets graded when the core comes back, same as everyone else's.

👉 Dig in

Over in Chihuahua, Silverco Mining (TSXV: SICO) lit up its 100%-owned Cusi property with a genuine screamer: 1,100 g/t silver over 10.3 metres, part of a fresh batch of underground and initial surface assays. For the non-geologists: that's roughly 32 ounces of silver per tonne over a real width — not a one-metre wink.

At ~$61 silver, high-grade underground ounces like these are exactly what the market's been hunting as the metal parks near multi-decade highs. The catch: Cusi is a historic district with a lot of old workings, so the trick for Silverco is knitting these hits into continuous, mineable shoots rather than a scrapbook of great-but-scattered intercepts. Promising rock — now show us it repeats.

👉 Read the full story

Radisson's record metre ran 1,604 g/t gold. Do the math and one tonne of that rock holds about 51 ounces of gold — roughly 1,700 times the grade a typical open-pit gold mine is thrilled to dig (about a gram a tonne). That's the whole romance and the whole trap of high-grade veins in one number: spectacular where you hit it, maddening to string together. One tonne like that is worth north of $200k in the ground; the hard part is finding the next tonne right beside it.

Keep your grades high and your dilution low. See you tomorrow. 🦍