Gold’s climb to record levels has fired up the efforts of junior gold explorers looking to get into production as soon as possible.

It means much of the exploration effort by the juniors is at brownfields deposits where remnant mineralisation from past workings and the hope of a meaningful extension is seen as the ticket to becoming a producer as soon as possible.

And it is. But the real (potentially) game-changing stuff is being undertaken by those juniors which are focused on making a Tier-1 discovery in frontier locations under cover because it’s hard to do, but the rewards can be huge.

Because of the squeeze on equity funds due to the broader market malaise, there are not many juniors involved in the high risk-high reward exploration described above.

One that is pursuing the model is Trek Metals (ASX: TKM) which last traded at 6.9c for a market cap of $36 million, which is a good $10 million above its market cap of a couple of weeks ago due to the buzz surrounding its Christmas Creek project in WA’s Kimberley region.

Trek is out of the Leibowitz-Biddle-Young stable. They are best known as the founding directors of Pilbara Minerals, the $4.4 billion ASX lithium market leader thanks to the discovery under the LBY crew of the world-class Pilgangoora deposit.

The LBY crew have given Trek chief executive Derek Marshall his head to go out and find the next big one.

A youngish geologist who delivered Newcrest/Greatland their initial resource of 3.4Moz of gold and 160,000t of copper at the Havieron discovery (now 100% Greatland) in the Paterson province of WA, Marshall is as excited about Christmas Creek as a CEO should be at this stage.

Christmas Creek was picked up from a bunch of technically-driven geologists after the world’s biggest gold producer Newmont (it now owns Newcrest) exited a farm-in deal with them on the property about six years ago.

Newmont spent $6 million doing all of the early grunt work on the project that needed to be done before deciding to move, as is the wont of the mining majors every now and again as they adjust their portfolios.

It means that Trek acquired an advanced project with known and widespread gold mineralisation, enabling it to move quickly on its maiden drilling program in the 2024 December quarter.

The reverse circulation drilling returned two nice hits, remembering this stuff is all under 10m or so of sand cover – which means the mineralisation has been hidden away from the world and wily old prospectors since the year dot.

The drilling at the Martin prospect returned 10m grading 12.66g/t from 59m and 10m at 7.34g/t gold from 94m. Both intersections contained still higher intercepts, including a 2m intercept grading bang on 1oz of gold a tonne.

Marshall said wide-spaced drilling had now confirmed gold mineralisation over a large footprint measuring about 800m by 500m, with two trends identified by multi-element analysis extending more than 1km in a north-easterly direction and 1.5km to the south-east.

The high-grade RC drill results sit at the intersection of the two trends.

Needless to say Marshall has been as keen as mustard to roll a drill back out to Christmas Creek to determine how extensive the high-grade stacked vein gold system is at the remote property.

To that end, Trek went into a trading half on Tuesday to complete a private placement of $3.5 million at 5c a share. Such is the interest in the company’s about-to-restart exploration effort at Christmas Creek, there was reportedly a stampede for the stock.

Early days but early signs are certainly encouraging, as well as being a welcome point of difference to the more common hunt nowadays for a near-term production opportunity without (potential) multi-million ounce upside.

Rare Earths:

The local market re-bounded strongly on Wednesday in response to conciliatory remarks from President Trump suggesting he could walk back from his punitive tariffs on China. And oh, he has backed away from booting Jerome Powell from the Federal Reserve.

Strangely though, ASX-listed rare earths stocks did not join the relief rally. They were sent south in serious fashion. Lynas (LYC) fell 7.5%, Meteoric (MEI) gave up 5.7% and RareX (REE) plunged 21% in a horror day for the sector.

It smacks of the local market misreading just what President Trump’s walk back from punitive tariffs and China’s is telling us. It is telling us that the US is freaking that its military and domestic industries have been caught in a rare earths pincer move by Beijing.

And Beijing is not going to let go until it has the US on tariffs where it wants it to be. Longer-term, the US must surely finally be awake that its reliance on Chinese rare earths and the permanent magnets it produces is unsustainable.

It needs to get out and about and along with Europe and South-East Asia, it needs to be fostering alternative supplies from friendly nations like Australia, Brazil, and parts of Africa – basically any non-Chinese sources of supply.

The funny thing is that President Trump has had his chief DOGE head kicker Elon Musk in his ear arguing for a walk back on the punitive tariffs because the supply of permanent magnets he needs for his dream of producing a Roman army of robots is at the mercy of China.

At his earnings briefing, Musk confessed that China’s April 4 introduction of export restrictions on the heavy rare earths that go into making permanent magnets and permanent magnets themselves in retaliation for the punitive tariffs was the root cause of his robotics problem.

He said the new restrictions had messed with supplies to Tesla.

“We’re working through that with China. Hopefully, we’ll get a license to use the rare earth(s) magnets. China wants some assurances that these are not used for military purposes, which, obviously, they’re not,” the Tesla CEO said.

Good luck with that. Beijing won’t be winding back the restrictions until the US backtracks in a major way on tariffs. Can President Trump handle the humiliation of it all? That’s extremely doubtful.

Washington-based bipartisan think tank the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) has had a deep dive into what China’s export restrictions meant for the US.

“Rare earth elements are crucial for a range of defense technologies, including F-35 fighter jets, Virginia and Columbia-class submarines, Tomahawk missiles, radar systems, Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition series of smart bombs,’’ the CSIS said.

“For example, the F-35 fighter jet contains over 900 pounds of REEs. An Arleigh Burke-class DDG-51 destroyer requires approximately 5,200 pounds, while a Virginia-class submarine uses around 9,200 pounds.

“The US is already on the back foot when it comes to manufacturing these defense technologies.

“China is rapidly expanding its munitions production and acquiring advanced weapons systems and equipment at a pace five to six times faster than the US. While China is preparing with a wartime mindset, the US continues to operate under peacetime conditions.’

“Even before the latest restrictions, the US defense industrial base struggled with limited capacity and lacked the ability to scale up production to meet defense technology demands.”

And then there was Musk whispering to President Trump that for the time being at least, he needs China’s supplies for his Optimus robots.

It is against that backdrop that Wednesday’s sell-off of ASX-listed rare earths stocks actually looked dumb.