Our next presenter probably couldn't be better timed. I'm just looking at the share price; it's up 41% today. Pretty exciting time for Waratah Minerals . We've got the Managing Director Peter Duerden to give us an update. Peter is a geologist and a mining executive with over 25 years' experience in mineral exploration and development across a range of commodities, with a track record of developing successful exploration strategies with juniors and majors. He previously held senior roles at Newcrest and Alkane Resources , where he played a role in the Boda Gold-Copper Discovery and led exploration in North Molong Belt. Peter's expertise is particularly focused on the East Lachlan mineral systems. He holds a Master's of Economic Geology and is a registered professional geoscientist and a member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists. Peter, looking forward to this.
Thanks a lot. Excuse me. Thanks, Andrew. Yeah, what an opportunity. Exciting times to talk about a gold discovery, an important gold discovery emerging in the Lachlan Fold Belt next door to Cadia Valley over east and here in the heart of gold country in Cowal. Keen to bring you straight into the excitement of today. We've been for the last 18 months executing a strategy around a different exploration strategy in an area that's been historically explored by several explorers, good ones, but I hope to show you that we're doing things differently. There's a reason why this discovery is unfolding now. Who can argue with these sorts of numbers? You know, 250 g⋅m hits underneath not that inspiring surface anomalism, but we really like the geology in this area. This hole here steps out the overall Spur Gold system or the Spur Gold Corridor another 500 m.
It has great significance in terms of the gold endowment of the Spur Gold Corridor, this hit. Let me step back. We'll come back to that pretty quickly. The highlights of this company, it's driven by innovative thinking, a different exploration strategy. We like the tier one upside potential of the Spur opportunity. As I say, it's very close to Cadia Valley. There's a real donut of neglect concept around a large discovery like that. Hopefully, I can communicate that. Again, as to a reason why we're making this discovery now. We've got a great team corporately. There's a great track record in terms of the board and increasingly building a really capable technical team. Good stories attract great people. We're really benefiting from that now. Proof of concept's being achieved. I think we can really definitely, definitely say that.
We're starting to demonstrate real serious metal endowment, gold endowment in particular. We're in a position now more than ever to accelerate and start to trigger more discovery events, start to demonstrate the true resource potential of the Spur Gold Corridor in particular. Great supportive, solid register there for a junior our size. We're in great shape. That summarizes the story. It's been one of great excitement. There's been volatility there. We've been going as hard as we can, but of course, trying to make careful corporate decisions in terms of when you're raising money. The acquisition of the project back in October, a couple of years ago, the market was a bit ho hum about that, but we did a small strategic placement to some notable West Australian mining people who have been great supporters going forward. Got Gladstone mining there at the top of the register.
Hole seven mid-last year was important. 57 at 2.5 with a sniff of copper. Was validating very, very quickly what it is, our proof of concept. As you can see, if you look in the detail, we've been making some other decisions around capital raising at higher share prices, which is what you want to see. Mobilized the second rig early this year. After the placement we did in May off the back of some shallow copper results, a couple hundred meters of over 0.5% copper equivalent. There is a porphyry story here for sure, but as you'll see, the gold opportunity is compelling. That's sort of our focus in every regard. Third rig mobilized off the back of the May placement. Three rigs operating currently, looking to ramp that up as of today's results. That's the board. Plenty of geologists.
Naomi's come on recently to beef up our legal M&A capabilities. Great track record. Andy's here at the conference with me. Daryl, serious discoveries, especially with Ivanhoe and Freeland. That's the part of the world we're dealing with. It's a long way away from here, but it's a real hot spot of mining and exploration investment. You're next to one of the world's great gold copper projects. Cadia Valley ramping up to 40 million tons throughput in a few years. It's a globally significant mine just over the hill from us. It represents Australia's premier porphyry terrain. I think increasingly, with the success, the Brownfields discovery success that Evolution have had since they purchased Cowal over the last eight years, they've added another 11 million oz to the endowment of Cowal. It's gone from three to over 14 million oz.
With great similarities to what we're finding at Spur, which is the gold epithermal system connected to the porphyry. It really is a hot spot. A lot of the junior grounds now, they're now in bed with some majors and some pretty big farm-in deals being done, mainly undercover opportunities, where the search base is obviously a long strike undercover on some of these belts is worth chasing, but difficult for a junior to do that for very long. You're starting to see the likes of AngloGold moving in. Evolution, of course, have been investing in mines, Cowal, and Northparkes more recently. You're seeing some other activity in where we're playing here at the Spur Project in the southern Molong Belt in that Cadia district. You're seeing Gold Fields about a year ago moved in with an earn-in deal on the ground surrounding us.
Of course, interesting times as Newmont take the wheel of Cadia Valley. Great potential. This stems back to some experience, I guess, that I've had working on those opportunities in the same rocks. I think it's really underdone. You want your geology team to have a lot of experience in that belt of rocks. You learn a lot through failure over many, many years. Every now and again, you succeed. You recognize the key controls on mineralization in the belt. That's what we've done here. A big magnetic image tells the story really well. The big magnetic highs there, some of them represent fertile intrusive complexes. A lot of the porphyry and the epithermal is very, very closely associated with those in the belt. The devil's in the details, and it comes down to the resolution of your magnetic data.
If you've got broad-spaced data sets and imagery, then you can say that mineralization sits within the big mag high. If you're looking at close-spaced high-resolution magnetic data sets, the story becomes a bit more interesting. Every single one of the deposits in the Lachlan and in the East Lachlan in particular, whether it's epithermal or porphyry, sits on the margins of that magnetic high when you get high-resolution data. The story is underpinned by that different way of thinking. The search space is not deep undercover here. The search space is a different strategy. We're looking on the margins of those mag highs. It's really hard for geologists not to drill the big blob. Great results that we're getting very, very quickly. Once we did that here, this was the opportunity we bought into. The proof of concept was quite easy to test. It's a shallow test.
We can just get on and drill some of those areas. In this case, we had some historic mines along the margin of the magnetic high. Straight away, pretty much, or hole two, I was particularly excited about the hole two result. The market didn't like that so much. It took hole seven to kick us along. Very quickly, we're getting, you know, 100 g⋅m hits in some really interesting looking rocks. This slide talks to why we're doing it, why we're the ones placed to make this discovery happen. The area has been explored by some really great groups, technically strong groups, even from the 1970s. The Yanks and Anaconda Copper were playing, looking for porphyry coppers in this district. Drilling into the main intrusive complex into that magnetic high.
Went through a period, not a lot happened, but over the hill from us, Ridgeway and Cadia Hill were discovered in the sort of the late 1990s. They were in an interesting geological setting. They were off the shoulders of the magnetic high at Cadia Valley. One thing that's fair to say is if you drill that main mag complex at Cadia Valley, you don't actually find any of the ore bodies. I hope that's coming through because that's really what's driving this discovery, that way of thinking. We call them wall rock hosted systems. We're doing that. We're seeing interesting epithermal and/or porphyry material. Rapidly demonstrating the scale, the nature of mineralization, very, very similar to a place like GRE 46, which is a Cowal orebody currently being mined and creating great cash flows for Evolution at the moment, as they do.
These sorts of orebodies, 100 g⋅m hits, make great underground mines in particular, but in our case, we've got it at surface. We can see along that southern margin of the mag high, it looks like we've got a two-kilometer zone, which we've been able to piece a puzzle together across a couple of faults and join it up. The position consoles, the hole 62, which we released today, which is the best result to date on the project. There at consoles, you can see as we cross the Essex fault, we're picking up the mineralized zone again there. Plenty of other targets to chase, but we're certainly very focused on that Spur Gold Corridor where we see, you know, that two-kilometer zone. It's of the same scale as GRE 46. It's got the same nature of mineralization. It's at surface rather than at depth.
Really juicy looking veins and stringers. We see, you know, a fair bit of visible gold in the mix. We see some really interesting associations like tellurium and bismuth, so strong associations pointing to the fertility of the system. You can start to slice and dice. The amount of drilling we've done now, we can slice this up and start to get a real feel for the scale of the growing system. You can see there hole 62. It's quite a bold... That was our first hole into that consoles. It's quite a bold hole. It was reentered a couple of times. It was initially an RC hole. Went to 200 m. We liked the look of it. Great exploration decision making. We put another 200 m RC on the bottom of that, took it to 400 m, a deep RC hole.
We liked the look of it at that point. The guys, we decided to put a diamond tail on it. It was the diamond tail that delivered that result, which is quite deep at consoles, but that's fast tracking our discovery there that's unfolding now at consoles and adding a lot of ounces very, very quickly to the Spur Gold Corridor. These are some of the rocks that we're dealing with at consoles. We see that as a major discovery. It could be concealed. There was very subtle sort of surface geochem at surface there. Great signs here in terms of evidence for the porphyry event, which is just like we see at Cowal. We see a fair bit of visible gold in this zone. Especially that bottom photo, you can see the orange halos around this vein of chalcopyrite veinlet. There's visible gold associated with that chalcopyrite veinlet.
Very, very good signs of fertility of the overall system. It's got a big magmatic engine driving it, this system. You can start to get a sense for the continuity of mineralization here. We will do screen fires on this material because we are seeing eight occurrences that have been logged visible gold within that zone. Certainly a pivotal hole for us and for, you know, the real gold endowment of that Spur Gold Corridor at the end of the day. The porphyry opportunity is there. We're not getting hung up on it. We're demonstrating that it's real. There are portions of the margins of the complex where you seem to get more of this preserved, the porphyry copper mineralization, which is beautiful looking stuff. You see the overprinting epithermal gold veins. You start to see how the systems are associated. Our focus will be on the Spur Gold Corridor.
We'll ramp up drilling from three rigs. We'll put more rigs on it. Great use of shareholders' money when you start to appreciate the discovery cost per ounce that we're building there. The most reasonable analog to point to in the belt is GRE 46, which is the current underground mine at Evolution' s Cowal mine. It's of the same scale, as I say, ticks a lot of boxes as far as the style of mineralization. We like what we're building there on the Spur Gold Corridor. It's a busy time. We pulled three geos over from Cadia. We've got six geos working on this now. We're pushing really hard. Really capable technical team that we're building around it. Start to do geometric work. You start some of the XRF images, building up knowledge around gold deportment. We've got a PhD student. She's doing a great job.
We're starting to bring a lot of good people along on this ride. We think it's an important gold discovery that's emerging on the doorstep of Cadia Valley. It's at a time, corporately, there's a lot of investment in that area. It's a good time to deliver this gold discovery for all sorts of reasons. We're in a position now more than ever to sort of hit multiple exploration fronts, multiple rigs. We're well positioned. Our cash position is strong. We're looking forward to driving it forward. Thank you.
Thanks, Peter. I do have one question given the hit today and the share price move. You've got three drill rigs currently. In a perfect world, where do you see that going to over the next six to 12 months?
Yeah, we'll add more drill rigs for sure. In that time, we're getting more confidence in our geological understanding. As I say, multiple exploration fronts give us great flexibility. Yeah, we'll continue to do extensional drilling. We haven't found the edges of the system. Then we'll start to do more infill target definition drilling. Naturally, we start to do holes that are more geometric, you know, metallurgical holes. They'll be infill. We'll be building the resource very, very quickly. For the time being, that extensional drilling is going to be very important as we're just stepping out, you know. It's going to be an exciting sort of discovery to watch in that sort of timeframe.
Thank you.