Bathurst Metals Corp. announced it has been granted a five-year drill permit for the company's Peerless Property in southwest British Columbia. The company will launch its first drill project on the Peerless Property in early February 2024, targeting gold mineralization in the Beta Zone.

Three drill holes are planned for 600m. The Beta Zone is an area of historical exploration that discovered a blind zone of high-grade gold mineralization in 1987. The 1987 drill program intercepted several gold occurrences with the best results of 1.02 oz/tonne over 15 ft, including 1.87 oz/tonne over 5 ft.

No other test drilling has occurred since 1987, and the mineralization encountered remains open along strike and at depth. Based on historical data, the geological setting of the Beta Zone consists of mafic volcanics, volcaniclastics, and ultramafic intrusive rocks. The majority of the ultramafics show listwanite alteration.

The term listwanite describes a mineralogical assemblage resulting from the carbonatization of serpentinized ultramafic rocks and represents a distinctive alteration suite commonly associated with quartz-carbonate lode gold deposits in BC and around the world. The mineralization in the Beta Zone appears to be concentrated along a northeast-trending, moderately northwest dipping thrust fault that is crosscut by a brittle-ductile east-west trending 50m wide structural panel dipping steeply to the south. Listwanite lode gold deposits typically exploit zones of structural weakness along faults.

Observed mineralization consists of pyrite, arsenopyrite, galena, sphalerite and chalcopyrite. Higher gold and silver concentrations have a strong positive correlation with arsenopyrite, which is mainly hosted in quartz-carbonate veins and micro veins.