A 141.5-Metre Gold Intercept, 1.29 Million Indicated Ounces and No Economic Study at Sitka Gold

The best hole Sitka Gold has drilled at its Blackjack deposit was published on 21 September 2026, and the shares rose 7.0 per cent on more than twice their average volume. Sitka Gold Corp., which trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol SIG, has been assembling the pieces behind that hole for years, and the order in which they arrived explains more than the hole does.

June 2024: the ground the best holes are drilled on was not yet Sitka's

Blackjack, Rhosgobel, Eiger and the Saddle zone all sit inside the Clear Creek property in the Dawson Mining District of the Yukon, part of the RC Gold project. Sitka agreed to buy Clear Creek outright under a purchase agreement dated 24 June 2024, with the payments spread over time. The counterparty was PricewaterhouseCoopers Inc., in its capacity as court-appointed Receiver and Manager of the assets of Victoria Gold Corp. Buying a flagship property from a receiver is a slower and more conditional process than buying it from a willing seller, and the final step took another two years.

January 2025: Blackjack got a number, and it was the good kind

A mineral resource estimate is a qualified person's statement of how much metal is in the ground and how confident the work supports being about it. Indicated means the drilling is close enough together to plan a mine around. Inferred means it is not, and Canadian rules bar an Inferred ounce from carrying economics.

Blackjack's estimate carries an effective date of 21 January 2025: 39.96 million tonnes at 1.01 g/t gold for 1.29 million Indicated ounces, plus 34.60 million tonnes at 0.94 g/t for 1.04 million Inferred ounces. That Indicated block is still the only one Sitka has. Everything added since is Inferred.

October 2025: the drill programme was paid for with money that comes with a deadline

On 30 October 2025 Sitka closed C$28,552,402 of financing: 16,235,000 flow-through shares at C$1.54 through a brokered offering and a further 2,305,521 at the same price non-brokered. A separate flow-through offering, closed on 5 November 2025, issued 1,500,000 shares at C$1.37 and raised C$2,055,000 from existing strategic investors. It carries the same 31 December 2026 exploration-spending deadline, bringing the total obligation from the two financings to about C$30.6 million.

A flow-through share lets a Canadian explorer pass its exploration tax deduction to the buyer, who pays a premium for the share because of it. The premium is not free. The money must be spent on qualifying Canadian exploration expenses, at RC Gold, by 31 December 2026, and the amounts were renounced to subscribers effective 31 December 2025.

Two features of that raise are unusual and both favour existing holders. No warrants were attached to the shares, so there is no overhang of cheap paper waiting to be exercised; the underwriters took 974,000 compensation options at C$1.54, expiring twenty-four months from closing. And the price, C$1.54, is well above where the shares trade today. Sitka has not raised equity since. The only cash raised in 2026 came from warrant exercises, disclosed on 10 August 2026: 7,255,946 warrants and 737,248 finder's warrants exercised for C$3,037,414.

February 2026: two more deposits joined the estimate, both of them Inferred

With an effective date of 25 February 2026, Rhosgobel and Eiger were added. Rhosgobel: 100.68 million tonnes at 0.70 g/t gold for 2.25 million Inferred ounces. Eiger: 32.14 million tonnes at 0.52 g/t for 0.54 million Inferred ounces. Consolidated, RC Gold carries 1,291,000 Indicated ounces and 3,829,000 Inferred ounces, all pit-constrained at a 0.30 g/t gold cut-off. The technical report, "RC Gold Project, NI 43-101 Technical Report, Dawson Mining District, Yukon Territory", was prepared with the resource estimates by Ronald G. Simpson, P.Geo., of GeoSim Services Inc., an independent consultant.

Three details govern how much that headline number is worth. The first is the split: three quarters of the ounces are Inferred. The second is the cut-off. At 0.30 g/t, a tonne of rock holds about three tenths of a gram of gold, roughly a hundredth of an ounce; the estimate counts material at that level because the deposits are at surface and road-accessible, which is the case for a low-grade open pit and also the reason the tonnage is so large. Sitka's own sensitivity shows the trade: at a 0.60 g/t cut-off, Rhosgobel reports 1.5 million ounces at 1.02 g/t rather than 2.25 million at 0.70.

The third is the pit shell, which is the constraint that decides which of those tonnes are counted at all. The RC Gold shells were run over a US$2,000 to US$3,000 per ounce gold price range with 85 per cent metallurgical recovery. Gold traded at US$4,368.60 an ounce on 18 September 2026, per USAGOLD's daily precious-metals report. A resource constrained at half the prevailing price is a conservative frame rather than an aggressive one. It is also not an economic study, and Sitka has never published one. There is no preliminary economic assessment for RC Gold, no capital cost, no operating cost and no mine plan.

March and May 2026: what the company kept, what it is giving away, and what else is in the rock

On 12 March 2026 Sitka announced a plan to spin its Nevada and Arizona assets, the Alpha Gold project in Eureka County and the Burro Creek gold-silver project in Mohave County, into a new company by plan of arrangement, targeting a listing on the TSX Venture Exchange or the Canadian Securities Exchange. As at 21 September 2026 the company has not announced the completion of that arrangement or named the new entity.

Metallurgy came on 4 May 2026: 94.3 per cent average gold recovery by whole-ore cyanidation, and 84.7 per cent initial tungsten recovery into a flotation rougher concentrate at under one per cent mass pull. Ten days later, on 14 May 2026, Rhosgobel's estimate was restated to include 51,345 tonnes of tungsten trioxide and 2.93 million ounces of silver alongside its gold. Tungsten is a genuine second metal in this rock rather than a press-release garnish, and the 8 September 2026 release reported 13.9 metres at 0.383 per cent tungsten trioxide in hole DDRCRG-26-063.

April 2026 brought something of a different kind. Sitka appeared in a segment produced by a commercial investor-television agency alongside six other Yukon explorers. That release carries no statement of whether the featured companies paid a fee, and Sitka's own disclosure does not address the question either way.

August 2026: the property became Sitka's, and a royalty was created on the way

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice granted an approval and vesting order on 18 August 2026, and Sitka completed the acquisition of a 100 per cent interest in Clear Creek on 20 August 2026. The final deferred payment was C$6,000,000 in cash; earlier instalments had been satisfied with shares in August 2025 and June 2026.

The price also included something the drill releases do not mention. At closing Sitka granted the vendor a 5.0 per cent net smelter return royalty over Clear Creek, buyable down to 2.0 per cent by a single payment of C$10,000,000 at any time after it is granted, with a right of first refusal on any third-party sale. A net smelter return royalty is a slice off the top of revenue, paid whether or not the mine makes money. Five per cent is high by any standard, and it applies to the ground that holds every ounce in the resource estimate. A future economic study on RC Gold has to carry either that royalty or the C$10 million cost of shrinking it.

The company's share structure page, dated 26 August 2026, shows 433,899,344 shares outstanding, 13,687,500 warrants at a weighted average exercise price of C$0.36, 17,750,000 options, and 465,336,844 shares fully diluted.

21 September 2026: the hole, and what it is measured in

Hole DDRCCC-26-133 at Blackjack returned 141.5 metres at 1.93 g/t gold, including 80.6 metres at 3.20 g/t and 6.0 metres at 9.46 g/t. At the Saddle zone, DDRCCC-26-135 returned 17.5 metres at 2.68 g/t starting at 4.6 metres downhole, DDRCCC-26-140 returned 71.2 metres at 1.15 g/t including 14.8 metres at 3.63 g/t, and DDRCCC-26-137 returned 40.0 metres at 1.51 g/t from 211.0 metres. A step-out at Eiger, DDRCCC-26-139, returned 30.5 metres at 1.46 g/t including 1.5 metres at 25.50 g/t. Sitka reports approximately 50,000 metres completed this year in 116 holes, against a 60,000-metre programme, with seven rigs turning.

These are drilled core lengths. Sitka's 8 September 2026 release puts the limit in its own words: intervals are drilled core length, as insufficient drilling has been completed at this time to determine true widths. The 21 September release reports no true widths either. A hole cutting a dipping zone at an angle passes through more rock than the zone is thick, so 141.5 metres is the distance the core covered, not the width of anything.

The sampling behind the numbers is properly described. Core was logged and sampled at Sitka's own facility, with a default 2.0-metre downhole sample length and intervals as short as 0.3 metres to isolate features of interest. ALS Laboratories prepared samples in Whitehorse and analysed them in North Vancouver, gold by fire assay with an ICP-AES finish on 50-gram subsamples, anything over 10 g/t re-assayed by fire assay with a gravimetric finish. Standards, blanks and duplicates were inserted by Sitka staff. The qualified person is Gilles Dessureau, P.Geo., the company's Vice-President, Exploration, named in that role in both the 8 and 21 September releases.

The market's answer was immediate. Sitka closed at C$1.07 on 21 September 2026, up 7.0 per cent, on 1.15 million shares against an average near 496,500, about 2.3 times, with a day's range of C$1.04 to C$1.11 and a volume-weighted average price of C$1.08. Market value was about C$464.3 million, against a 52-week range of C$0.75 to C$1.36.

Market data read after the close carries cash and equivalents of C$34.90 million and total liabilities of C$21.68 million from the most recent filed statements; SEDAR+ was not readable when this was written, so the cash figure is the market-data figure rather than one read off the interim statements themselves. The company last stated its own position on 16 January 2026, at over C$45 million with no debt, before the C$6 million Clear Creek payment and most of this year's drilling.

Which leaves one date in the near future that is not a drill result. About C$30.6 million of flow-through money from the two financings has to be spent on Canadian exploration at RC Gold by 31 December 2026, and about 50,000 of 60,000 planned metres are done. The drilling will finish because it has to.

Transparency note

Transparency note. This is an independent due-diligence analysis and editorial opinion piece produced by The Maple Markets editorial desk. It is not sponsored, promoted or commissioned, and no compensation of any kind has been received from Sitka Gold Corp. (TSXV: SIG), Victoria Gold Corp. or any party acting on their behalf. The analysis is based on public disclosure available as of the publish date; every figure is attributed to its primary source. The Maple Markets and its authors may hold positions in securities mentioned; nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, and readers should not treat it as investment advice. Past disclosure does not guarantee future results. Policies: Editorial Standards · Financial Disclaimer.