MAGE Is Nearing Production As Gold Continues Its Record Surge
- Checkers
- 5 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Magellan Copper and Gold Corp. (OTCID: $MAGE) is a gold mining company out of Wallace, Idaho that acquires past-producing mines across the Western United States and works to bring them back online. Dozens of historic gold mines were shut down not because they ran out of ore but because of wartime regulation, low prices, or outdated technology, and the economics of going back into those properties look completely different now than they did when gold was last trading at a few hundred dollars an ounce. The company has even caught the attention of Harbinger Research, whose December coverage initiation on Eco Innovation Group (OTCID: $ECOX) preceded a 1,000%+ run. MAGE currently sits at a market cap of just over $7 million while targeting a transition to active gold producer as early as this summer, starting with a fully permitted placer operation in Alaska.
That operation is the Ophir Creek Placer Gold Mine near Ophir, Alaska. The company announced a Letter of Intent in January to acquire 100% of the property from Village Gold, Inc. Ophir Creek spans approximately 620 acres across nine Alaska State Mining Claims, is fully permitted by the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, and has mining equipment already on-site from prior operations that pulled 66,000 ounces of gold over the life of the mine. Magellan's team visited the site in July 2025 and conducted systematic sampling, returning results of 1 to 3 grams per ton of gold against estimated production costs of $25 to $28 per ton. Harbinger Research, which initiated coverage earlier this month, modeled the 2026 season at Ophir Creek projecting roughly 2,894 ounces recovered for nearly $15 million in revenue and $6.7 million in profit.
Ophir Creek is designed to be the engine, but Magellan's flagship property is the Center Star Gold Mine near Elk City, Idaho, a historic underground mine with approximately 4,000 feet of existing workings that the federal government shut down in 1942 under the War Powers Act to redirect labor toward the war effort. Historical reports have identified roughly 127,000 tons of mineralized material in the ground containing an estimated 60,000 ounces of gold, worth approximately $300 million at the prices gold was hitting just last week, and that figure does not include two additional veins discovered in the early 1980s that had never been mapped and have never been mined, assaying at approximately 1.0 and 2.7 ounces per ton. Magellan is currently working through the historical data and preparing to get back into the 1980s drift to verify those grades with modern sampling and drilling.
Center Star and Ophir Creek are the core of the portfolio, but last February Magellan inked a deal with Gold Express Mines to joint venture on the Atlantic Cable Gold Mine in Montana, a property first discovered in 1866 that went on to become one of Montana's top bonanza-grade gold producers. The mine sits on 480 patented acres plus another 500 unpatented between Anaconda and Philipsburg, and like Center Star it was shut down by the War Powers Act with an estimated 207,000 tons of mineralized material still in the ground grading 0.11 to 0.14 ounces of gold per ton. Magellan earns a 45% interest by putting $400,000 into development over two years, and modern drilling has already intercepted gold at grades from 0.23 to 3.44 ounces per ton across multiple intervals.
Most exploration-stage miners run on an endless cycle of private placements and share issuances, diluting shareholders before any value is created. Magellan has kept its share count to roughly 35 million with only 6 million unrestricted, and its plan to keep it that way is to generate non-dilutive cash flow from Ophir Creek and use it to fund corporate overhead and Center Star exploration simultaneously, breaking the cycle that grinds down most junior miners. When the acquisition closes and if the operation performs near modeled assumptions, the company funds its own drilling and development out of gold production rather than going back to the tap every quarter.
Executing this plan requires people who have actually built and restarted mines before, and Magellan's team is stacked with them. CEO Michael Lavigne has been in the mining industry since 1975 when he went to work for Hecla Mining (NYSE: $HL), and later built a broker-dealer around mining companies. COO Greg Schifrin brings over 40 years as a geologist across Idaho and Alaska and knows the Center Star area from decades of prior fieldwork, while CFO John P. Ryan co-founded what became Americas Gold and Silver (NYSE American: $USAS) and ran the Bunker Hill (CSE: $BNKR) restart in North Idaho.
Harbinger Research initiated coverage as a Strong Speculative Buy with a 12-month price target of $0.65 to $0.75, roughly 3x from where the stock trades today, and the catalysts to get there are already in motion. When the Ophir Creek acquisition closes and production begins this summer, Magellan goes from an exploration-stage company with a compelling pitch to a company that is actually producing gold. Center Star's verification work picks up from there, and at $5,000 gold the grades in those 1980s veins carry a completely different weight than they did when the data was first collected.
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