Hawkstone Mining Ltd (ASX: HWK) shares are flying higher today. At the time of writing, the Hawkstone share price has soared 8.3% to 5.2 cents after climbing as high as 5.5 cents in morning trade.
This compares to a 0.58% gain on the All Ordinaries Index (ASX: XAO). And it's enough to put the Hawkstone share price up 420% in 2021. In fact, you could have bagged those 420% gains by buying Hawkstone shares as recently as Thursday 14 January. At the time, Hawkstone Mining was trading for just 1 cent per share.
Why is the Hawkstone Mining share price on the rise?
A big surge in the Hawkstone share price late last week came thanks to positive news from the company's lithium operations. However, the United States-focused, diversified minerals explorer's intraday gains today look to be driven by gold.
In an update to the ASX this morning, Hawkstone Mining reported "spectacular grades" from its Devil's Canyon Gold Project, located in the Carline trend in Nevada, US.
This comes after the company completed additional rock sampling, airborne drone magnetics and structural mapping at the project.
If you're interested in a few of the technical results, the airborne magnetic survey identified additional geophysical features including "magnetite skarn alteration at lithological contacts and along structures", and "zones of magnetite destruction possibly related to later mineralising events".
The company noted the project is just 20 km east of Kinross Gold Corporation (NYSE: KGC)'s Bald Mountain Mine, which has a resource of 5.9 million ounces of gold. It also reported that the Carlin trend has already produced more than 195 million ounces of gold. Clearly, Hawkstone is hoping to add to that figure.
What did management say?
Addressing the drill results, Hawkstone Managing Director Paul Lloyd said:
These highly encouraging rock sample assay results from our Devil's Canyon Project further confirm and extend mineralised areas identified from previous work, which when combined with the recently completed aeromagnetic survey data, show several areas for high priority follow-up.
These high-grade results reinforce our business model of exploring for world class gold deposits in the Western United States adjacent to large gold resources or producing gold mines. This is in addition to our Big Sandy Sedimentary Lithium Project in Arizona that remains the company's primary focus.
The company is continuing with drill targeting work and stated it expects to commence the maiden drilling program at Devil's Canyon in the 2021 US northern field season.
