Seahawk Gold Corp.

You'll sometimes see a mining company report a single rock sample with an eye-popping gold number. Before getting excited, here's what experienced investors check first.

Gold grades are measured in grams per tonne (g/t). For context, many producing gold mines operate on ore in the low single digits of g/t, so one sample showing tens of grams per tonne can look spectacular. But the number alone means little until you know what kind of sample produced it.

There are a few main types. A grab sample is a single piece of rock picked from surface, usually chosen because it looks mineralized. A channel or chip sample cuts a continuous line across an exposure. A drill sample pulls core from below ground. Grab samples are the least representative by design. They're selected from the best-looking material, so one high grab result tells you gold is present somewhere, not that it's spread across a property.

That's why the honest phrase in good disclosure is that selective samples "are not necessarily representative." It isn't box-ticking. It's the whole difference between a promising sign and a proven deposit, and the only way to close that gap is systematic sampling and, eventually, drilling.

If you follow junior mining, this single habit, always asking what kind of sample produced a number, will make you a sharper reader of every news release you see.

Staking a claim is not the same as finding a mine. Here's everything that happens in between.

When people hear a company holds "claims" on a piece of ground, it's easy to assume gold is already sitting there waiting. In reality, a claim is just the legal right to explore.

What follows is a long, methodical process, and most projects never reach the finish line. That isn't failure. It's how the industry works.

The rough stages go like this. First, a company acquires or stakes ground it believes is prospective, usually based on geology, exploration history, and location. Then comes early-stage work: mapping the surface, running geophysical surveys to "see" below ground, and collecting soil and rock samples to test for mineralization. If the early signs are encouraging, geologists generate drill targets, the specific spots worth testing. Drilling is where most of the cost and most of the answers live. Only a small share of projects produce results strong enough to justify defining a resource, and fewer still ever become a mine.

Done well, this is patient, disciplined work, not a lottery ticket. The skill is in deciding where to spend the next dollar.

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