Argonaut Gold Drills 7,000 Meters Targeting High-Grade Silver in Historic Tonopah District

Silver47 Exploration launched its most ambitious Hughes Project campaign yet on March 23, drilling into the eastern extension of the Tonopah Mining District with a minimum 7,000 meters of combined reverse circulation and diamond drilling and approximately $54 million in working capital behind the effort.

The program targets three named discoveries: Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald, positioned 1.3 to more than 4 kilometers east of the established boundary of the Tonopah Mining District, which ranks as Nevada's second-largest historic silver producer. The company opened the campaign with a fence of angled holes at Ruby, chasing the main high-grade structure that prior drilling had confirmed but not yet fully mapped.

The numbers from that earlier work carry weight. Hole SUM23-59 at Ruby returned 1,450 grams per tonne silver equivalent over 3.0 meters, a result combining 8.41 grams per tonne gold and 813 grams per tonne silver. That intercept came from a new vein 1.5 kilometers east of the historic district's edge, and the mineralization remains open, which is central to why the company has committed rigs to zones stretching farther east this season.

CEO Galen McNamara, a professional geologist and the company's qualified person for the Hughes Project, has been tracking Ruby's potential since Silver47 first drilled it in 2020. "Since we first drilled the Ruby target in 2020, our technical team has believed this is one of the best high-grade silver-gold discovery opportunities in Nevada," McNamara said.

Sapphire, situated 2.9 kilometers east of Ruby, draws its targeting from coincident arsenic-in-soil anomalies and high chargeability readings from induced polarization surveys. Emerald adds a third geological vector, with drilling aimed at epithermal gold-silver mineralization within a breccia system at depth, probing alteration zones identified near the bottom of earlier hole SUM23-61.

Tonopah's historic productive silver trend spans approximately four kilometers. Silver47 is betting that its eastern ground can push that corridor another 4.2 kilometers, a thesis the current campaign is designed to systematically test.

Operationally, a core rig was already on site and advancing a pre-collared hole when drilling started in late March. A reverse circulation rig was set to arrive shortly after, drilling pre-collars that would later receive diamond core tails through the priority target horizons.

McNamara described the season in pointed terms when drilling commenced. "2026 is shaping up to be a transformative year for the Hughes Project," he said. "In addition to advancing our high-grade resource base, we are aggressively pursuing the main high-grade structure along the eastern extension."

Silver47's overall portfolio carries a combined inferred resource of 236 million ounces silver equivalent at 334 grams per tonne across its North American projects. With rigs now actively turning east of Tonopah's historic core, results from this season's holes will determine whether that figure grows substantially or sends the company back to the geological drawing board.