Kirkland Lake Discoveries Doubles the Mirado Footprint with a 500-meter Step-Out at Mirado West

Kirkland Lake Discoveries (TSX-V: KLDC, OTC-QB: KLKLF) used a roughly 500-meter step-out hole to confirm a brand-new zone — now called Mirado West — at its KL South property in Ontario's Abitibi Greenstone belt, the company announced on September 2 and CEO Stefan Skelpowitsch walked through on The KE Report.

The headline hole returned 1.22 grams per tonne gold over approximately 70 meters. On the strength of that intercept, the company renamed what had been the MZ zone target to Mirado West, treating it as a continuous extension of the existing Mirado South zone. The step-out has stretched the east-west mineralized trend to more than 1,300 meters, Skelpowitsch says, and effectively doubled the footprint of the system.

Mineralization at Mirado West looks identical to Mirado South: narrow, high-grade feeder veins one to three meters wide, surrounded by broader, lower-grade disseminated gold (finely scattered gold grains spread through the host rock). The pairing matters because each style can carry the project economically in a different way. The feeders offer speed of payback on mine infrastructure. The dissemination extends potential mine life through bulk tonnage (large volumes of modestly graded ore processed at scale).

At the existing Mirado North and South zones, KLDC has now completed more than 26,000 meters of drilling this season. The hits include 39 g/t over 16 meters (hole 4), 2 meters at 79 g/t (hole 10), and 0.5 g/t over 91 meters (hole 19). Skelpowitsch notes that every drill hole to date has hit gold.

The two zones have different geology. Mirado North shows steeply dipping, stratigraphically controlled mineralization — what Skelpowitsch describes as gold-rich "books on a shelf" that the team has not yet found the bottom of. The Mirado fault bisects the system and gives way at the South zone to tighter folding and compression, producing the fold-nose geometry (a hinge zone where rock layers bend back on themselves) that hosts the high-grade feeders.

The September 2 press release flagged a deep backlog of assays (lab results from drill core samples). Four more holes from Mirado West are pending, plus nine from the Mirado North and South areas, and six regional holes. Two follow-up holes have already been drilled to the northwest of Mirado West. Step-outs on the North zone are being pushed out 150 meters or more along the geological trend to test how far the system extends.

Beyond Mirado, Skelpowitsch touched on three other targets:

- KL West. Earlier drilling returned what Skelpowitsch calls a "technical success" with elevated molybdenum, tungsten, and bismuth — a trace-element signature he reads as pointing to a large intrusive-related system (a gold system whose heat and fluids came from a buried igneous body). Hyperspectral imaging (a scanning technique that maps alteration minerals invisible to the eye) is being used to vector toward the mineralization. The target is not a near-term focus. - Gold Hill. A shear-hosted quartz vein (gold deposited in a fault zone filled with quartz) that produced gold in the 1920s and has not been drilled in over 60 years. Drilling is being deferred to late fall because access crosses a private hunt camp that is off-limits during hunting season, roughly mid-September through November. - Bank. Grab samples returned more than 30% pyrite (an iron-sulfide mineral commonly associated with gold systems). Historical trenching on the property previously intersected roughly 30 meters of high-grade material. Assays from this season's sampling are still pending. Bank is drill-ready.

On the resource side, KLDC plans to re-engage SRK — the firm that produced the project's historical 2013 resource estimate — to identify data gaps and design drilling that could lift confidence in the high-grade zones. One reason: the company has hit individual samples as rich as 1,670 g/t, but standard resource practice caps high-grade assays to limit the influence of outliers; the current cap is 30 g/t. Better drilling density, and therefore higher geological confidence, could justify raising that cap and capturing more of the bonanza material (extremely high-grade gold intercepts) in a future estimate.

The company is also using the drilling program to scope out the surface footprint for environmental baseline work. Skelpowitsch explains that environmental baseline studies (early-stage surveys of water, soil, wildlife, and air used to measure the pre-mining condition of a site) need a defined mine footprint to be useful, and waiting four more months to drill has roughly doubled the area the studies need to cover. The team plans to complete those baseline studies by next summer so they do not have to be redone as new zones are added.

Looking at the run of catalysts, the most material near-term inputs are the four pending Mirado West holes and the nine pending Mirado North/South holes, all of which could meaningfully expand or refine the current picture of the system. Bank assays and the start of late-fall drilling at Gold Hill add further optionality. Step-out holes to the northwest of Mirado West and the larger 150-meter-plus North zone step-outs will start to frame the ultimate scale of the mineralized footprint.

For investors, the central question is how big Mirado can ultimately get — every hole to date has hit, and the company is now testing the boundaries rather than infilling (filling gaps between known drill holes to upgrade a resource) for a near-term resource update. Against the Pixys 12 criteria, the work described here is squarely in the early-stage, footprint-defining phase: the team is generating optionality on size first, and intends to return to infill and resource work once the boundaries are clearer.