Gateway appears to have cracked the code at its Yandal Gold Project in Western Australia, with some cracking results. The upside now could be huge.
Richard Pugh is Chief Executive Officer of Gateway Mining Limited (ASX: GML), a Perth-based gold explorer whose flagship Yandal Gold Project covers 1,780 square kilometres on the eastern flank of the Yandal greenstone belt in Western Australia, alongside the Glenburgh South and Barrelmaker projects.
Pugh is a geologist with more than 18 years of industry experience, having worked as a senior consulting geologist and exploration manager for ASX-listed explorers. He came to Gateway with the ground already familiar. As Technical Director of the Yandal Gold Project at Strickland Metals, he ran the work that turned Millrose from an unloved asset into a $61 million sale to Northern Star Resources, and led the drilling at Horse Well that more than doubled the resource there and established what controls the gold along the belt. Gateway acquired the Yandal project from Strickland in August 2025 for $45 million in convertible preference shares, and Pugh was appointed Chief Executive Officer shortly afterwards.
Pugh holds a Bachelor of Science in Exploration and Resource Geology from Cardiff University and is a Member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists, acting as Competent Person under the JORC Code for the company's results. He works alongside Executive Chairman Andrew Bray, a foundation shareholder and former Chief Executive Officer of Strickland Metals, and Non-Executive Directors Anthony McClure, David Morgan and David Crook.
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Pugh frames the Cowza discovery as an overnight success five years in the making. Working across Millrose and Horse Well from 2021, he and his team noticed that the deposits behaving best were the ones sitting on a particular contact. Palomino and Warmblood, the two largest at Horse Well, sit on a mafic-intermediate contact, run high grade, plunge north and remain open in fresh rock. Bronco and Marwari, formed in the footwall, carried good oxide and transitional gold but had no contact for the gold to drop out against, so they stayed shallow. From those observations came four criteria: the mafic-intermediate contact, evidence of fluid flow in the form of demagnetised zones where the fluid has stripped magnetite from the rock, northeast-trending structures creating the gaps for gold to settle into, and a position on the Celia Shear. Cowza jumped out of the dataset more than anywhere else.
Cowza had been drilled in the 1990s by Eagle Mining, which found good oxide and transitional results in the southern part of the prospect but nothing with roots underneath. Gateway pulled the historic chips, sent them for multi-element analysis and found a single rock type with no mafic component, which said the contact they wanted was further east. Three lines of aircore on that contact returned 4 metres at 3 grams per tonne and 4 metres at 4.7 grams per tonne. Cowza ticked every box: 4.5 kilometres of demagnetisation, buffered against two northeast-trending structures on the Celia lineament, and now a proven mafic-intermediate contact. Six reverse circulation holes were then drilled into fresh rock beneath the oxide intercepts. The first punched through a 40-metre-wide shear zone and returned 41 metres at 2 grams per tonne gold from 104 metres, including 9 metres at 7.5 grams per tonne. As Pugh puts it, the hypothesis was right.
The value of a repeatable set of criteria is that it can be pointed at ground nobody has drilled. Gateway announced one such target on the morning of this interview: Pewy, a Cowza look-alike sitting south of the Ward prospect along the Celia Shear, with three kilometres of demagnetisation on the mafic-intermediate contact and no drill testing to date. Flanking aircore has already returned 8 metres at 1 gram per tonne to the south and 4 metres at 1.4 grams per tonne to the north, which Pugh reads as everything vectoring towards the demagnetised zone. With Cowza, Celia South and Ward's seven-kilometre trend, the known mineralised corridor runs beyond 13 kilometres and could stretch to 19 if the gap between Ward and Cowza fills in. Pugh's view on what that could amount to is unambiguous: Horse Well could be a million ounces in its own right, Cowza multi-million, and Pewy multi-million again.
Gateway went to market for $25 million and came away with $45 million at 8 cents a share, lead managed by JP Equity Partners. The swing factor was London-based Jupiter Asset Management, an existing shareholder Pugh says was one of the few funds appearing on the register daily and actively picking up stock. Gateway had modelled Jupiter for $5 million to $10 million. It came in for $20 million. Add $15.1 million in cash and liquid securities, including $8.23 million banked from selling the Brightstar Resources shares Gateway received for the Montague East gold rights, and the company is carrying roughly $60 million against a market capitalisation of about $230 million. Ninety cents in every dollar goes to the new discovery and ten cents to tidying up the existing resources. Two diamond rigs arrive at the end of the month, around six rigs should be turning at Cowza by year end, Pewy drilling starts in October, and a 120,000-metre reverse circulation and diamond program is now funded.
The Yandal resource Gateway bought from Strickland stands at 8.17 million tonnes at 1.52 grams per tonne for 400,400 ounces, weighted to the Horse Well camp with Dusk 'til Dawn alongside it. That resource was built for a purpose, constraining as much oxide and transitional material as possible into $4,000 gold pit shells to around 140 metres depth, which is why the fresh rock below it has barely been tested. Palomino and Warmblood are both open at depth and down plunge. On the corporate question, Gateway sits about 50 kilometres from Northern Star's Jundee operations, and Pugh is straightforward that the same management group transacted the Millrose deal with Northern Star, making a sale one option among several. The bigger the company gets, the more options it has, and at multi-million ounces it could stand alone. Executive Chairman Andrew Bray has put more than $10 million of his own money into the register and takes no options or performance rights.
