Upside Gold Adds 1,000m to Kena Drilling After Sulphide Find

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Upside Gold Corp. did something junior explorers rarely do mid-campaign: it changed the plan. Partway through logging core at its Kena Gold-Copper project near Nelson, British Columbia, the technical team spotted sulphide mineralisation running sub-vertically and cutting across the host rock fabric, outside the known resource boundary. That observation was enough to add another 1,000 metres of drilling.

Junior miners do not expand programmes casually. Every extra metre costs money that comes from shareholders, so the decision to keep drilling signals genuine technical conviction, and it comes ahead of a major corporate milestone slated for Q1 2027.

The geological pivot driving the 1,000-metre expansion

Picture the core shack after a long season. Boxes of split rock line the benches, geologists working through metre after metre of recovered core. That is where the plan changed.

Upside Gold originally budgeted roughly 4,000 metres for its 2026 Kena campaign. By 2 September 2026, the company confirmed it had drilled 5,180 metres across 19 diamond drill holes, already well past the original target. Core logging and sampling were still underway, with material continuing to go out for analysis.

Then came the geological surprise. Detailed logging indicated that sulphide mineralisation and the hydrothermal alteration around it appeared to follow a more sub-vertical orientation, cross-cutting the host rock foliation rather than running parallel to it. In plain terms, the valuable material may be sitting in steep structures the earlier drilling was not designed to intersect cleanly.

Gold deposit geology directly shapes why a sub-vertical sulphide orientation matters so much to the technical team: steeply dipping structures often control where hydrothermal fluids concentrated metals during the original mineralising event, and a drill programme designed for shallower intercepts can systematically underestimate a deposit’s true grade if the high-value veins are actually near-vertical.

That observation drove the decision to add approximately 1,000 metres across four supplementary holes, each around 250 metres, targeting the South Zone and the Kena Copper-Gold Zone.

Here is how the 2026 programme has evolved:

• Original plan: approximately 4,000 metres
• Completed phase: 5,180 metres across 19 diamond drill holes
• Planned follow-up: approximately 1,000 metres across four holes (roughly 250 metres each)

The detail you cannot skip past: no assay results have been reported. Everything so far rests on visual core logging and the technical team’s interpretation of what they are seeing. That is a high-confidence move by management, but confidence is not grade. Until the lab confirms the gold and copper numbers, this expansion carries real risk for your position, and it is worth separating the optimism of a promising-looking core box from the certainty of a confirmed intercept.

Stepping beyond the established 3.3-million-ounce footprint

The expansion looks bolder once you see what Upside already has in the ground. The Kena project carries a sizeable historical resource, estimated in 2021, that anchors the baseline value of the stock.

A historical resource estimate is a calculation of the amount and grade of metal a property is interpreted to contain, based on earlier drilling and classified by confidence level. Here is what Kena holds.

That is roughly 3.3 million ounces of historical gold, wrapped by a large copper halo that points to porphyry-style potential alongside the established gold mineralisation.

The copper halo surrounding Kena’s gold resource is characteristic of porphyry copper deposits, large-scale geological systems where copper and gold mineralisation are genetically linked through the same magmatic-hydrothermal processes, which is why step-out drilling into the Kena Copper-Gold Zone carries implications beyond just adding gold ounces.

Now the gamble comes into focus. Both the South Zone and the Kena Copper-Gold Zone sit entirely outside that 2021 boundary. This is step-out drilling, testing ground where no resource is currently defined.

The reward is substantial. According to Upside’s technical communications, the goal is to demonstrate enough continuity and grade to define a second major mineralised zone on the property. The risk is equally real: step-out holes can return weaker grades or discontinuous mineralisation, and aggressive drilling that fails to deliver coherent new zones can dilute capital efficiency and delay the infill work needed to upgrade existing inferred ounces.

What this means for your read on the stock is specific. A successful step-out does not simply bolt a few ounces onto the existing total. It tells you the property could host a parallel system, which would reset the scale of the entire investment thesis rather than nudge it.

Funding the runway to Kena’s 2027 resource update

Geology sets the ambition, but market reality decides whether a junior can see it through. On this front, Upside has already cleared the first hurdle.

The company closed a brokered private placement on 12 June 2026, raising gross proceeds of $5,137,600, roughly $5.14 million. That financing is directed toward advancing Kena through systematic exploration and drilling, which means the expanded campaign, including the four follow-up holes, is fully funded. For a pre-resource junior, funding certainty removes one of the two things that most often derails an exploration story.

The second thing is timing, and this is where the calendar matters. Upside is targeting an updated mineral resource estimate for Q1 2027. That update will not rest on the 2026 drilling alone.

A mineral resource estimate is not simply a count of ounces in the ground; it is a modelled output that requires sufficient drill hole density, consistent sampling, and geostatistical validation before any confidence category can be assigned, which is why folding in the 5,000 metres of post-2021 historical drilling alongside the 2026 step-out holes is a necessary precondition for a credible Q1 2027 update.

It will also fold in approximately 5,000 metres of historical drilling completed after the 2021 estimate, data that has been sitting on the shelf waiting to be modelled. Combine that backlog with the new step-out holes, and the Q1 2027 estimate becomes the moment all the accumulated work gets converted into a single number the market can price.

Mark that window. The resource update is the primary valuation catalyst for the stock over the coming months, and it is the point where the technical team’s sub-vertical theory either shows up as tonnes and grade or does not.

Grading Kena’s upcoming assay pipeline

Strip the news back to its core and the picture is clear. Upside Gold is sitting on a large historical resource of roughly 3.3 million ounces of gold, and it is spending fresh capital to chase something potentially bigger in ground that currently holds no defined resource at all.

The sub-vertical sulphide theory is the engine of that decision, but right now it is only an interpretation drawn from visual logging. The pending assays are the first undeniable test. They will confirm whether the steep structures the geologists are seeing actually carry economic gold and copper.

Exploration uncertainty is not an abstract concept at this stage of the Kena campaign: a step-out programme built on a visual logging interpretation, with no confirmed assay grades yet, represents exactly the kind of high-variance bet where the financial cost of a wrong call falls disproportionately on shareholders who entered at elevated pre-result prices.

From there, the market’s verdict arrives with the Q1 2027 resource update. Watch whether these step-out holes feed in as a second mineralised zone or as scattered, hard-to-model intercepts, because that distinction is what separates a re-rate from a quiet disappointment.