Olympio Metals ramps up Canadian gold work after cashing in non-core asset
- Doug Bright
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
Olympio Metals (ASX: OLY) has resumed fieldwork at its flagship Bousquet gold project in Quebec, Canada, with a targeted soil geochemical sampling program and review of historical diamond drill core now underway.
The 290-sample survey was collected from a second soil horizon immediately below the exposed surface layer using a hand auger across a tight 50m × 50m grid.
The program was designed to test an additional 1.5 kilometres of prospective strike immediately west of the existing 1.3-kilometre-long, east-west Paquin–Amadee mineralised trend, which runs sub-parallel to and near the regional-scale Cadillac Break.
The Cadillac Break – otherwise known as the Cadillac-Larder Lake Fault - stretches for more than 300 kilometres across Quebec and Ontario and marks a tectonic boundary between the Abitibi Sub-province’s Pontiac sediments to the south and the volcanic-dominated Abitibi Greenstone Belt to the north.
In addition, we are starting a resampling program of historical drill core at key locations at the Paquin Prospect.
Olympio Metals Managing Director Sean Delaney
The fault’s genesis has created one of the world’s most productive gold structures - collectively hosting more than >110 million ounces of gold to date - and is the key reason why virtually every significant gold deposit in the southern Abitibi is either on or immediately adjacent to the Break.
Olympio’s Bousquet tenure straddles the Break and sits within 15km west from two operating multi-million-ounce gold mines – Agnico Eagle’s 15.8 million ounce LaRonde operation and Iamgold’s 2.4 million ounces Westwood project
The fertile Paquin–Amadee mineralised corridor is interpreted as a splay or second-order structure tapping into the Break’s deep fluid plumbing system, which is almost certainly the reason it’s kicking out the sort of grades and widths Olympio has been hitting at its Paquin East-Paquin Central targets.
We look forward to seeing the results of the soil sampling program and assessing its suitability for implementation across the Bousquet Gold Project. Soil sampling is a cost-effective method of gaining broad-scale coverage of the project area and will help with targeting for Olympio’s follow-up drill program.
Olympio Metals Managing Director Sean Delaney
The Paquin–Amadee trend remains open to the west with no previous drilling, while magnetic data suggests the structure may swing west-northwest. The new soil sampling is designed to pinpoint any such deflection.
Olympio says the samples have now been submitted to the laboratory for analysis, with results expected in the coming weeks. Strong gold and pathfinder trends from sample analysis will be used to refine high-priority drill targets.
Meanwhile, the company’s geologists are also re-logging and selectively re-sampling historical diamond core from the Paquin prospect.
Recent oriented core drilling has also delivered the project’s first reliable structural dataset, feeding a new 3D model that pinpoints previously un-sampled or under-sampled zones down-dip and down-plunge of the known gold lodes.
Planning for the next round of drilling at Paquin is already in progress, with final assays still awaited from the recent diamond drilling program, including five drill holes from Paquin and the nearby CB-1 target.
The company’s renewed activity follows yesterday’s announcement that Olympio has signed a binding agreement to divest 100 per cent of its nearby, non-core Dufay project to TSX-V-listed Fokus Mining Corporation for C$500,000 ($A544,700) in cash and shares.
Olympio says the sale will sharpen its exploration focus and provides additional funding for the company’s Bousquet program, where it is earning an 80 per cent interest from a C$1.25 million (A$1.36M) down-payment and a C$2 million (A$2.18M) exploration commitment.
With a streamlined portfolio, fresh capital from a recent placement and its non-core ground sale and multiple exploration fronts now active, Olympio is aggressively advancing what it regards as one of the most prospective underexplored sections of the Cadillac Break.
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