Placer & Paleoplacer Gold — How Buried Gold Channels Form

What placer gold actually is

Gold in the earth's crust starts out locked in rock — usually in quartz veins and mineralised structures formed when hot, metal-bearing fluids moved through fractures. Over geological time, weathering and erosion break that rock apart and release the gold as flakes, grains and nuggets.

Because gold is roughly seven times denser than common river sand, moving water sorts it out. Whenever a current slows — behind a boulder, on the inside of a bend, in a bedrock crack at the bottom of a channel — the gold drops out while lighter material keeps travelling. Repeat that for thousands of years and the base of a river channel becomes a natural gravity concentrator. That accumulation is a placer deposit.

This is why the first gold discovered in almost every mining district in the world is placer gold: it sits at surface, it is visible, and it can be recovered with a pan, a sluice or a gravity plant instead of a mine and a mill.

What makes a deposit a paleoplacer

A paleoplacer — from the Greek palaios, meaning ancient — is a placer deposit that is no longer part of the landscape you can see. The river that built it stopped flowing long ago. Glacial till, clay, sand or younger sediment buried the channel, and the modern topography may bear no relationship to where the ancient watercourse actually ran.

The gold is still there, still concentrated in the same way, still resting on or near the bedrock floor of the old channel. What changes is the exploration problem. You cannot prospect a paleoplacer by walking a riverbank. You have to work out where the buried channel goes, and then drill through the cover to prove it.

From bedrock source to gravel — and back again

Every placer deposit has a parent. The gold in the gravel was once inside solid rock somewhere upstream, and the character of the placer gold carries information about that source:

• Grain shape and wear. Flattened, rounded gold has travelled a long way. Coarse, angular, chunky gold has not — the source is close.
• Nugget size. Large nuggets are fragile and do not survive long transport. A district known for big nuggets is a district with a nearby lode system.
• Trace-element and gold-silver signature. The ratio of gold to silver and the accessory minerals attached to the grains fingerprint the mineralising system, and can be matched against bedrock samples.
• Channel direction. Gold grade normally increases upstream toward the point where the source rock fed the drainage.

This is why a paleoplacer channel is worth two exploration programs rather than one. The gravel itself is a target, and the gravel is simultaneously a signpost to the bedrock lode source that produced it.

How a buried channel is explored

Modern paleoplacer exploration is a sequence of narrowing steps:

1. Historical reconstruction. Old workings, shaft locations, production records and claim maps show where earlier miners found gold and how deep they got.
2. Geophysics. Seismic and related surveys image the bedrock surface under the overburden, revealing the shape and depth of the buried valley the channel follows.
3. Drilling. Holes are collared across the interpreted channel to measure overburden thickness, gravel thickness, depth to bedrock and gold content at each station.
4. 3D modelling. The drill and geophysical data are combined into a channel model that defines geometry, continuity and an exploration target.
5. Bedrock follow-up. The same data set is used to vector toward the hard-rock structures feeding the channel.

Paleoplacer gold in Quebec — the Beauce channel

Canada's first documented gold rush was not in the Yukon or British Columbia. It happened in the Beauce region of southern Quebec in the mid-1800s, where prospectors working the Gilbert River drainage near Saint-Simon-les-Mines recovered coarse gold and unusually large nuggets from alluvial gravels.

The Beauce Gold Property covers roughly six kilometres of that buried paleoplacer channel. Beauce Gold Fields has been advancing it with drilling and a seismic survey of the channel, and in 2026 located 19th-century mine shafts at its eastern end — physical confirmation of where the historic miners followed the gold.

In parallel, the company is testing the bedrock story. Phase 1 drilling at the Grondin saddle-reef target returned a broad shallow gold zone including 5.0 m at 1.90 g/t Au and 1.0 m at 6.59 g/t Au, supporting the interpretation that a lode system in the underlying rock shed the gold that the placer miners later collected downstream.

Detailed results, maps and the current work program are on the Beauce Gold Property page, the drill highlights page, and in the company's press releases.

Why this deposit type attracts exploration

• Shallow. Channel gravels sit at or near the bedrock interface, generally within tens of metres of surface, so drilling is fast and inexpensive relative to deep hard-rock targets.
• Simple metallurgy. Coarse free gold in unconsolidated gravel is amenable to gravity recovery rather than chemical processing.
• Historically proven ground. A district that produced gold by hand has already demonstrated that a mineralised system exists.
• Two targets, one data set. The same drilling that defines the channel also narrows the search for the bedrock source.

Exploration is inherently uncertain. Historical workings, geophysical interpretations and exploration targets are not mineral resources or reserves, and there is no certainty that any of the targets described here will become economically mineable. See the company's public disclosure for full technical information and qualified-person statements.