Many Peaks aims to scale new heights in West Africa after stellar March quarter

One of Australia’s top mining journalists, Kristie Batten writes for Stockhead every week in her regular column placing a watchful eye on the movers and shakers of the small cap resources scene.

West African gold explorer Many Peaks Minerals (ASX:MPK) has made a very strong start to 2025 thanks to exploration success in Cote d’Ivoire, where the company has outlined the potential to uncover a multimillion ounce deposit.

The stock has more than doubled since the start of the year, including a 40% rise in March.

That’s due to high-grade gold results intersected in the company’s first diamond drilling campaign at the Ferké gold project.

All six holes of the program at the Ouarigue South prospect intersected mineralisation, covering around 760m of strike.

Results included a headline 45m at 8.58 grams per tonne gold from 104m, including 25m at 14.8g/t gold and 7m at 1.58g/t gold, which Miner Deck deemed the best gold hit released by an ASX gold company in the two weeks to March 18.

“This was an infill hole into about a 300m corridor of previously drilled mineralisation,” Many Peaks managing director Travis Schwertfeger said during a recent presentation.

“It’s close to triple the previous grades, and I believe, probably the first intersection into what is potentially the feeder structure that’s mineralising an intrusive body at Ferké.”

Other high-grade hits included 26.95m at 1.95g/t gold from 181.5m, including 10m at 3.38g/t gold; 5.45m at 1.84g/t gold from 70.9m; 6m at 2.31g/t gold from 224m; 47m at 3.72g/t gold from surface, including 14m at 10.7g/t gold; and 54.17m at 1.88g/t gold from 59.58m, including 6.75m at 10.4g/t gold.

Schwertfeger said there had been less than a kilometre of drilling along the 12.5km strike length.

“We’ve just recently finished augur drilling, and that highlights multiple targets,” he said.

“So what we’re looking for is several more Ouarigue lookalikes, which I think builds us out to a 3-5 million ounce potential target if we can find similar style mineralisation along strike, and the anomalies that we see are on par with what we’ve already discovered, so we’re quite encouraged about what we’re seeing.”

Aircore drilling is underway, which will feed into reverse circulation program in the next six weeks.

A second diamond drilling program will follow.

Following the high-grade result, Many Peaks raised A$6.22 million in a private placement to accelerate drilling.

A good example

There’s no doubt Many Peaks will be aiming to emulate the success of another Cote d’Ivoire-focused explorer, Turaco Gold.

Many Peaks actually acquired its ground from Turaco a year ago.

Turaco offloaded its ground to focus on its Afema project, a former Endeavour Mining project, in the country’s southeast.

Within months of acquiring Afema last year, Turaco reported an initial resource of 2.52Moz at 1.2g/t gold.

An updated resource estimate is due shortly.

Canaccord Genuity analyst Paul Howard, who visited Afema last month, already forecasts a US$300 million operation to produce an average of 130,000oz per annum at all-in sustaining costs of US$1250/oz.

The market has rewarded Turaco’s success and the company has a market capitalisation of $356 million, around 10 times Many Peaks’ market cap.

Like Many Peaks, Turaco shares have doubled over the past year.

The company was added to the All Ordinaries index last week.

Right neighbourhood

Earlier this month, Lowell Resources Fund chief investment officer John Forwood told Stockhead that Cote d’Ivoire was one of the world’s hottest gold exploration destinations.

“Cote d’Ivoire seems to be the absolute flavour of the month, if you’re not in the WA Goldfields then Cote d’Ivoire is a pretty good second prize,” he said.

Schwertfeger agrees, describing it as the best jurisdiction in West Africa.

“It’s a country that has the highest proportion of the greenstone belts that host gold mineralisation in West Africa but has probably seen the least proportion of expenditure for exploration, probably due to security and sovereign risk in previous years,” he said.

“In recent years, it’s been very good, and that’s basically kind of flipped to where now Mali and Burkina Faso are obviously quite challenging to work in.

“Cote d’Ivoire is seeing the focus of exploration expenditure, and I think it has the potential to catch up and surpass Burkina, Guinea and Mali.”

At Stockhead we tell it like it is. While Many Peaks Minerals is a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing, it did not sponsor this article.