Sitka Gold's Blackjack Hole 132 Hits 218m of 1.25 g/t Gold, Including High-Grade Core at 600m Depth

The video is an interview with Mike Berkey, Sitka Gold's director and vice president of corporate development, posted on The KE Report on August 12, 2026. The discussion walks through a four-hole news release dated August 10 from the RC Gold project's Blackjack deposit and frames what the latest drilling means for resource growth and the emerging underground picture.

The standout result was hole 132. It returned 218 meters at 1.25 grams per tonne gold from the upper portion of Blackjack, drilled down the eastern margin and continuing below the deposit. Within that long intercept were two higher-grade intervals: 44 meters at almost 4 grams per tonne (3.8 g/t) at roughly 600 meters depth, and 92.7 meters at 1.14 grams per tonne. The deeper, higher-grade zone is the part that matters most for the underground thesis. According to Berkey, that interval sits outside the current resource boundary on the southeastern margin of Blackjack, and the team is "hitting that higher-grade mineralization at depth," which "kind of gets us thinking about that potential underground resource."

Whether that potential becomes a formal resource estimate comes down to drill density. As Berkey explains, any underground resource requires enough drill density at depth for the independent resource geologist to "wrap a resource around" the higher-grade zone. The company will know by year-end whether it has accumulated that density. If it falls short of declaring a full underground resource, lower-density drilling can still indicate potential. Either way, the grades are "ballpark" what an underground operation would require, which is why drilling continues down-dip.

Hole 132 ended in a multi-phase intrusive — coarse- and finer-grained intrusive phases with metasediments between them. Berkey notes that in Blackjack, those multi-phase intrusions are commonly associated with higher grades, and the fact that 132 reached that intrusive for the first time, with mineralization continuing, is a positive read on the system at depth.

The second hole discussed was 129, which returned 118 meters at 0.5 grams per tonne gold — a much broader but lower-grade intercept, with 32 meters at 1.4 grams per tonne inside it. The hole sits outside the current Blackjack resource but inside the conceptual pit limits, drilled to the east toward the Saddle zone. Saddle is a near-surface target with previously reported mineralization in flat-lying sills, including last year's intersections of "up to 40-some-odd meters of 1.5 grams."

The strategic angle on 129 is the emerging east-west geological link. According to Berkey, mineralization at Saddle and onward toward Eiger appears to follow a lamprophyre dike trend (a dark-colored intrusive dyke that often acts as a pathway for gold-bearing fluids) running from Blackjack through Saddle to Eiger. With more drilling, the team hopes to "pull those resources and start looking at the resource link between these two areas." If mineralization is continuous along that trend, the practical implication is concrete: rock currently classified as waste inside the pit shell could be reclassified as resource, which would improve the strip ratio — the amount of waste rock that has to be mined for every tonne of ore — and could join what are now two separate pits into a single larger pit.

The pace of the program is substantial. As of the interview, Sitka is running six drill rigs across Blackjack, Saddle, Eiger, Rosgobble, and the Contact-Pukoman area, with a seventh rig being mobilized. The seventh may go to the Bearpaw Breccia target. Drilling has already passed 32,000 meters on the year. Berkey says the team is "firing on all cylinders," with core loggers and core cutters keeping pace, and expects assay news flow to pick up as labs catch up. The near-term catalysts are further expansion drilling at the known deposits and step-out work to bring Saddle into the Blackjack resource, plus first-pass drilling at Contact-Pukoman aimed at supporting a separate mineral resource estimate there later this year.

The broader picture for investors is that the drill program is generating the kind of data needed to grow the resource base in two directions at once: laterally, by potentially linking Blackjack, Saddle, and Eiger along the lamprophyre dike trend into a single continuous system; and vertically, by adding a higher-grade underground component to the existing pit-constrained resource at Blackjack. Both outcomes would expand the contained ounces — the total gold in a deposit, regardless of how it is mined — at the project. The open questions are how dense the deep drilling ends up at year-end, which determines whether an underground resource can be declared, and whether the dike trend holds together geologically between the deposits. Both will be tested by ongoing drilling over the coming months.