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Visionary Gold (VIZ-V): Family footsteps lead to high-grade gold hunt

Visionary now drilling at Wolf project, a neglected historical gold camp in Wyoming

By James Kwantes
Resource Opportunities

Junior exploration projects are notorious for their pitfalls. Lack of minerals is the obvious fatal flaw; others run the gamut from geology and geography to social licence and permitting, with other risks in between.

Venomous snakes slithered onto that list at the last gold project Wes Adams worked on, deep in the jungles of Guyana. This was no metaphorical jungle: one day Adams had a close encounter with a parrot snake, a nocturnal serpent that relies on ambush, not hunting, to ensnare its prey. “I went to go take a shower and there was a parrot snake in there waiting for me,” Adams says with a chuckle.

Wes Adams, Visionary Gold CEO

Adams escaped unscathed and the gold project, Toroparu, survived too. It eventually grew to 10.5 million ounces (all categories); Toroparu owner GoldX Mining, formerly known as Sandspring Resources, was purchased by Gran Colombia Gold earlier this year for $315 million. Measured and indicated grades at Toroparu are 0.91 g/t gold (plus silver and copper credits) and recent drilling has identified zones of higher-grade mineralization.

Wes’s father John Adams and his business partner Rich Munson worked an oxide gold mining operation in Guyana before drilling underneath and hitting the Toroparu mineralization. They developed Toroparu privately for several years, with Wes playing a key role, before vending it into Sandspring in 2009.

When they got started, the only way in was through boat or helicopter. Later, Wes’s trips to Toroparu required a flight into Georgetown, Guyana’s capital, followed by an hour-long riverboat ride and a bumpy 10-hour drive through the jungle in a Bedford army truck.
That road didn’t exist when Wes started working at Toroparu in his early 20s. He operated as a kind of high-level jack of all trades. Tasks included running the oxide gold mining operation, overseeing the camp build and running a 60-man camp at age 23 (an airstrip was added later), surveying the 140-kilometre road into camp and spearheading construction of long stretches of the road.

The Toroparu gold deposit in Guyana, recently purchased by Gran Colombia Gold.

A NEW GOLD COMPANY
Adams’s latest venture, Visionary Gold (VIZ-V), is drilling a project much closer to home and with established infrastructure. Visionary’s flagship Wolf orogenic gold project is in central Wyoming, about a five-hour drive from Adams’s ranch home near Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Visionary has consolidated a 50-sq-kilometre land package in a historical gold district — the Lewiston camp — that has seen no modern exploration.


Visionary recently raised $3.5 million through the sale of 18-cent units (one share, one 2-yr half-warrant exercisable at 27c) to drill Wolf. Adams put $225,000 into the upsized financing, taking his stake to 10.78 million Visionary shares, or about 15% of the company. Adams and other insiders kept the company (formerly Galileo Exploration) afloat during the dormant years before it acquired Wolf.

Visionary is drilling an initial 3,500-metre program and is funded to add metres as merited. Company geologists have identified five separate gold-bearing structures that they plan to advance. The first drill target is a geophysical anomaly directly below high-grade surface mineralization at the historical Wolf mine.

The drilling comes after a year of land acquisition as well as grassroots exploration that included sampling, geochemical surveys, mapping and geophysics. Visionary has identified a shear zone that outcrops at surface and has been mapped for more than one kilometre. A 2020 channel sample across the strike of the mineralized shear yielded 5.19 grams per tonne (g/t) gold over 10.25 metres including 39.19 g/t over 1m. Other channel samples included 8 metres of 2.13 g/t Au and 2m of 5.67 g/t.

Small-scale high-grade orogenic lode gold workings litter the Lewiston and South Pass gold trends. The Wolf is one of more than two dozen mines in the area that are estimated to have collectively produced more than 500,000 ounces. Gold was first discovered in the 1840s and production continued until 1956.

The historical Carissa gold mine in Wyoming’s Miner’s Delight Formation.

Visionary started by acquiring a 10-square-kilometre claims package that included the Wolf claims. The company has since doubled its land position twice, most recently (on May 10) purchasing a nearby claims package from Innovative Exploration Ventures, a private company, for $99,000 in Visionary stock. The deal was for 6,000 acres of state leases and unpatented mining claims and also comes with a state-wide geological database including airborne magnetics, geochemical data, mapping and drill-hole records. Two geologists from Innovative’s team will assist the exploration program on the new land package.

FROM WILD WEST TO COWBOY STATE
The focus now is the “Cowboy State” but those early days at Toroparu were more like the Wild West, jungle edition. Prospectors emerged out of the bush and mini-towns popped up as Adams and his crew carved a road out of the dense bush.

During one trip into the project, Adams drifted off to a fitful sleep in the back of the Bedford. When he woke up, the truck was lurching through a town he had never seen before.

“I went to the driver and asked, “Where are we? I don’t recognize this, we’re not on the road to Toroparu.”

The driver replied, “Yes we are. The Brazilians made an alluvial diamond discovery here and built a town.”

Adams says: “There were stores, rum shops, a hotel, a discotheque, a brothel. There was clearly money being made and spent. It was like the Wild West in the middle of the jungle, with everything that comes along with that.”

After the successful reverse takeover that created Sandspring, Adams spent about four years as Sandspring’s investor relations director. In that role, he developed important capital markets relationships and raised almost $100 million in equity towards the development of the project.

In 2014, Adams switched focus from Guyana to the Powder River Basin. He founded and then operated Energy Fuels Environmental, a private Wyoming-based oil and gas environmental services company. After building up the business, he sold it to Tallgrass Energy, a major midstream energy company, in 2017.

THIRD-GENERATION MINER
Adams spent a lot of time trekking around Wyoming’s Lewiston gold district assembling Visionary’s land package. He’s following in the footsteps of both his grandfather, Robert (Bob) Adams, who discovered uranium in Wyoming and built Colorado’s largest coal mine, and his father, who took over the family’s private uranium company and later found gold at Toroparu.

They’re rather large footsteps. When the United States entered the Second World War, Bob Adams enlisted and served as a bombardier. While his plane returned from a bombing run to Berlin, it was shot down over Germany. Adams was captured and imprisoned in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp for a year, later escaping with the help of a German family. Upon his return to Wyoming after the war, he went into business with his father, who owned a milk plant, hotel and restaurant in Rawlins, Wyoming.

At the restaurant, geologists and prospectors would come in talking about uranium after scouting for the mineral in nearby hills. Adams took note. He found a wealthy physician, Dr. C.W. Jeffrey, to financially back him and began to prospect for uranium himself on the hills above Rawlins. Adams bolted radiation detectors that could identify uranium occurrences onto the wings of his private plane. He eventually hit pay dirt, identified an economic ore body and built Wyoming’s first uranium mill. The company town, Jeffrey City (named for the doctor), grew to a population of 4,000 people. Adams sold one of his first companies, Western Nuclear, to Phelps Dodge.

His later private company, Energy Fuels, was a predecessor to the public uranium company of the same name. It was America’s largest uranium producer during the 1980s and early 1990s while the United States was the world’s largest producer of yellowcake. Wes’s father John took over Energy Fuels when Bob Adams died in 1982.

The Adams family connections extend to Colorado, where Energy Fuels operated the state’s largest coal mine. The Steamboat Springs airport is named Bob Adams Field; Wes’s father John was a former 40% owner of the NFL’s Denver Broncos. It’s an impressive family pedigree, one that has helped Wes pick up claims from prospectors as Visionary consolidates a land package in a state where his grandfather was a mining pioneer.

TOP TEAM
Wes’s interest in Wyoming gold exploration was piqued by a book. The author, acclaimed geologist Dan Hausel, investigated Wyoming’s gold and copper occurrences during a long career with the Wyoming Geological Survey. In the book, Hausel identified the Wolf mine as the likeliest location for an economic gold deposit in Wyoming.

“The reason I’m doing this is because I read one of Dan’s books,” Adams said. “I circled that passage and started there.”

Hausel, one of the 2009 Thayer Lindsey Award winners for the Donlin Creek gold discovery in Alaska, is now a member of Visionary’s exploration advisory board. Both the size and quality of the advisory board are rather rare for a junior exploration company. It suggests that Visionary could become something more than a single-asset exploration company.

Mining has always been the backbone of Wyoming’s economy, and without it, communities begin to disappear.

Wes Adams, Visionary Gold CEO

“We’re always on the lookout to add high-quality assets,” Adams says.

Visionary’s latest advisory-board appointment, Stan Dempsey Sr., illustrates the high level of experience and expertise on Visionary’s team. Dempsey is the founder and former chairman of Royal Gold, which he started as a small oil-and-gas play and developed into a dividend-paying royalty powerhouse. Royal’s cornerstone royalties are on the Cortez gold mining complex, a series of high-grade open-pit and underground mines operated by Nevada Gold Mines. Dempsey is based out of Golden, Colorado and will help Visionary on ESG issues.

Stan Dempsey, Sr.

The Mining Hall of Fame member joins an experienced roster of geologic advisors, who have been credited with several discoveries of world-class mines. Some of them started their careers working for Wes’s father at Energy Fuels and all have worked in Wyoming.

There is also orogenic gold expertise at the board level. Director Darren Lindsay is a geologist with experience in Archean greenstone belts in Nunavut and Ontario. Director Marc Blythe is a mining engineer currently working as a consultant at Evolution Mining’s Red Lake gold mine, where his roles have included mine manager as well as planning and geology manager.

Visionary has high insider ownership for a junior exploreco. Wes and John Adams own a combined 27% of shares and management, directors and other close associates take the total to about 75%. With a modest valuation of $12 million and a small float, the share price could move hard if the company hits high-grade gold in this drill campaign.

A MINING REVIVAL
When Adams drives from his Steamboat Springs home to Visionary’s Wolf project along Highway 287, he passes through the former boomtown built by uranium and his grandfather. Time has not been kind to Jeffrey City (below). When uranium prices fell off a cliff, so did the city’s population: 95% of residents left in three years. What remains is a dusty ghost town of empty buildings and ramshackle homes, where tumbleweeds have replaced residents.

Jeffrey City, Wyoming

Today, there are echoes of Jeffrey City’s fate in Wyoming’s many coal towns, which are depopulating as the world transitions from coal to cleaner forms of energy. In addition to making money for shareholders, Wes is motivated by the prospect of reviving a gold mining industry in a state where family roots run deep.

“Mining has always been the backbone of Wyoming’s economy, and without it, communities begin to disappear,” Adams says.

“The opportunity here is to transition from fossil fuels to more valuable commodities like gold and copper, which can be mined with much smaller footprints and far less environmental impact.”

Disclosure: James Kwantes owns shares of Visionary Gold and the company is a sponsor of Resource Opportunities. This article is not financial advice and all investors need to perform their own due diligence, especially in the junior mining sector.

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Ridgeline Minerals: From bear-market bootstrapping to high-potential Nevada play

  • High-grade silver discovery takes shape at Selena
  • Ridgeline (RDG-V) has $3.5M in treasury to drill Nevada projects
  • Nevada Gold Mines is hitting boomers near Ridgeline ground

By James Kwantes
Resource Opportunities

Nevada’s silver-laden history branded it “The Silver State” but the present is paved with gold. The more valuable precious metal is Nevada’s top export, worth US$2.7 billion in 2019 (casino games is a distant second at $550 million).

Since the 1962 discovery of Carlin-type gold by John Livermore and Alan Coope, more gold has been discovered in Nevada than almost anywhere on Earth. Gold ore is blasted and trucked out of giant open-pit deposits like the Goldstrike pit in the Carlin trend. It’s dug out from high-grade operations deep underground in the Carlin and Battle Mountain-Eureka trends and the Cortez camp. Gold also bleeds out of dozens of oxide heap-leach projects that dot the state.

Nevada’s importance came into sharp focus two years ago when Barrick and Newmont — the world’s two largest gold miners — combined their operations in the state to form Nevada Gold Mines (NGM). That deal was struck only after Barrick CEO Mark Bristow launched a hostile bid for Newmont, backing off when Newmont agreed to form the Nevada joint venture. Barrick is the operator and owns 61.5% of Nevada Gold Mines, which produced 2.13 million ounces of gold in 2020. It’s an important profit center for both companies.

FROM PRAIRIES TO PREMIER
Gold is also what brought geologist Chad Peters from Manitoba to Nevada, where he lives with his wife Carla and their two young sons. Peters is president and CEO of Ridgeline Minerals (RDG-V, RDGMF-OTC), which IPOed last year and drilled two of its four exploration projects in Nevada’s most important gold districts. If junior miners are lottery tickets, Ridgeline is more like a handful of them — each project could be worth multiples of the company’s current enterprise value of $13.8 million.

Ridgeline is planning follow-up drill programs in 2021, with a focus on expanding their high-grade oxide-silver-gold discovery at Selena in the South Carlin trend, and Swift in the Cortez district. The goal at the latter is to identify a high-grade multi-million-ounce gold deposit. But Ridgeline’s most valuable projects could still end up being the two that are under the radar for now: Carlin-East and Bell Creek. Those properties are in the heart of the Carlin trend, near Goldstrike, and Nevada Gold Mines has been hitting world-class intercepts on the doorstep. More on those later.

Ewan Downie’s Premier Gold (PG-T) plays a primary role in the story of how Peters ended up in Nevada. While studying geology at the University of Manitoba, Peters landed a summer job with Premier Gold working in Ontario’s Red Lake gold camp. That gig turned into a 10-year career with the company, much of it in Nevada. Premier Gold made its first foray into the state in 2012 with the purchase of the mothballed Cove mine project in the Battle Mountain-Eureka trend. Peters and his wife Carla moved down to Winnemucca, Nevada the same year.

At 27, Peters was the senior exploration geologist in charge at McCoy-Cove, where he led the discovery of the CSD Gap deposit. Cove now hosts 1.7 million ounces of gold at 10.8 g/t and is one of Nevada’s highest-grade undeveloped gold deposits. It’s also one of the cornerstone assets of i-80 Gold Corp., the Nevada-focused spinout that will emerge from the friendly acquisition of Premier Gold by Equinox Gold (EQX-T), announced December 16. The CSD Gap discovery was based on a new geological interpretation, an MO that Peters is now employing with Ridgeline.

Peters rounded out his time with Premier as the Nevada exploration manager, overseeing all of the exploration projects as well as Premier’s JVs with majors — including the South Arturo mine with Barrick. As the company advanced its portfolio in Ontario, Nevada and Mexico, Premier’s focus shifted from exploration to development and production. Exploration is Peters’s passion and he decided to strike out on his own in 2018, co-founding private exploreco Ridgeline Minerals with good friend Steve Nielsen, who also happened to own a drilling company. That wasn’t a coincidence …

BOOTSTRAPPING IN A BEAR MARKET
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The Charles Dickens quote from A Tale of Two Cities could also apply to Ridgeline’s early days. Peters left a well-paying job with a solid employer and took the plunge, starting Ridgeline out of an “office” in the garage of his Winnemucca home. Local relationships that he built living in Nevada helped Peters secure the company’s land package through EMX Royalty Corp. (EMX-V) — now one of the largest held by a junior in the state with three of the four projects literally at Nevada Gold Mines’ doorstep.

Next, Peters partnered with Neilsen, a Nevada businessman who owns Envirotech Drilling and had worked with Chad at the Cove discovery. The two struck an equity deal that gives Ridgeline the cheapest drilling costs of any company in Nevada. That means more dollars into the ground, increasing the odds of new discoveries. This partnership is already paying dividends with a shallow-oxide silver discovery announced at Selena months after the IPO.

The launch forced a new skill set on a guy more accustomed to navigating rock types than capital markets: raising money for a private exploreco during the depths of a bear market. It was a rather gruelling experience that tested his mettle and made for some interesting dinnertime conversations, Peters recalls: “I told Carla it would take me three to six months to get the company financed, and she ended up supporting the family for 14 months.” Private financing rounds at 12 and 22 cents with Ridgeline’s core shareholders funded early exploration, with the Peters family putting in $150,000 of their savings.

Ridgeline VP Exploration Mike Harp at Bell Creek, with a Barrick drill in the background
at Nevada Gold Mines’ Sinkhole Breccia target.

Peters tapped Mike Harp, an exploration geologist with 8 years of experience with Gold Standard Ventures (GSV-T) in the Carlin trend, as Ridgeline’s VP Exploration. Harp was a senior member of the team that found 5 million ounces for Gold Standard in the Railroad-Pinion district, including leading discovery of the North Dark Star deposit. Duane Lo, a veteran of the mining exploration sector, came on early as CFO and splits his time between Ridgeline and Entree Resources (ETG-T). At the board level, Peters brought in Newmont’s longtime Nevada specialist Lewis Teal, who has decades of discoveries under his belt and has authored multiple publications on the Carlin trend.

Relationships are one of the keys to Peters’s success and it shows in Ridgeline’s share registry. Early shareholders include heavyweights of the junior mining scene such as David Elliott, Paul Stephens and Andre Gaumond. Peters remains on good terms with Premier boss Ewan Downie, who invested in Ridgeline while the company was still private. He has shareholders on both sides of the recent Premier-Equinox deal — the Equinox management team also put money into Ridgeline’s IPO and Equinox CFO Peter Hardie joined Ridgeline’s board in October 2020. “The Davids” from EMX — CEO David Cole and chief geologist David Johnson — both invested in Ridgeline personally before it was publicly listed.

Three years after that bumpy launch, Ridgeline sports a $17.3-million market capitalization, with $3.5 million in the treasury to drill four high-potential projects in Nevada’s most important gold districts. As it turned out, the early adversity Peters faced running a private exploreco was good preparation for going public.

The Ridgeline chart has been a roller-coaster since the August 2020 IPO at 45 cents that raised $5 million. The stock promptly ran up to 75 cents before a long slow slide — some investors bailed when there were no immediate discoveries — took shares down to lows of 30 cents in December. “Discoveries aren’t made overnight,” Peters remarks. “At Selena it took us three phases of drilling and 21 holes to make a discovery.”

“Discoveries aren’t made overnight. At Selena it took us three phases of drilling and 21 holes to make a discovery.”

Chad Peters, Ridgeline Minerals CEO

In this emerging gold bull market, Nevada is again a hotbed of gold and silver exploration, with hundreds of juniors searching for economic deposits across the state. Many of those projects are far removed from the main Carlin/Cortez/Battle Mountain-Eureka trends, a gold epicenter that hosts a combined 220 million ounces of past production and current resources. Ridgeline is well-positioned with 125 square kilometres of ground in the middle of all three districts.

ONE IS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS
Having a Canadian CEO who lives in Nevada sets Ridgeline apart in a state crowded with junior miners whose bosses live elsewhere. His northern roots also landed Peters, now 34, an unexpected side gig — he was recruited to coach his son’s hockey team after other parents discovered he was Canadian.

Those “boots on the ground” put Peters at the center of the action, allowing him to hear of new discoveries first or soak up important tidbits of intel. It has even opened doors to acquiring cheap but valuable data, or claims from the prospectors who still control large land positions on Nevada’s still-fractured claims map. Peters lives less than a two-hour drive from Ridgeline’s Swift, Carlin-East and Bell Creek projects and five hours from Selena.

It’s not Ridgeline’s only key edge. That strategic drilling contract has allowed the company to stretch those dollars and drill 1,300 metres at Carlin-East in 2019, a combined 5,636 metres at Selena and Swift last year, and still enter 2021 with a healthy treasury of $3.5 million to drill all four projects. As a 7.8% shareholder, Peters is incentivized to make sure those dollars go as far as possible. Management owns a combined 17% of shares and public companies — EMX, Vior and Ethos Gold — own another 19%. Institutions are at 12%.

HIGH-GRADE SILVER AT SELENA
At Selena, Ridgeline went looking for gold but found silver — wide intervals of oxide high-grade silver, along with lower-grade gold. The company hit paydirt with hole 21, which intersected 36.6 metres grading 67.08 g/t silver and 0.26 g/t gold (90.05 g/t silver-equivalent “AgEq”). The discovery followed two earlier programs that had encountered promising hits, including 3m of 823.5 g/t AgEq and 36.5m of 77.8 g/t AgEq.

Mineralization outcrops at surface and has good continuity, extending for more than a kilometre down-dip and along strike. “We are drilling wide-spaced step-out scout holes and they keep hitting,” Peters says.

On a gram-meter basis, Selena results compare favourably to other high-grade silver explorecos, including in Nevada, that have market capitalizations much higher than Ridgeline’s. Selena’s grades are also multiples of those at Coeur Mining’s Rochester open-pit mine in Pershing County, Nevada — America’s largest silver mine. Rochester’s proven and probable reserves average about 11.3 g/t silver and 0.085 g/t gold. Coeur is in the initial stages of building a major expansion of the mine.

Peters and Harp recently managed to acquire the historical drill-hole database for Selena from the 1980s. That data, combined with the new discovery, will help the team design the next drill program, which could launch in April if the weather cooperates. Early metallurgical testwork shows the silver and gold oxide mineralization is amenable to heap-leaching. It remains early days but Selena is shaping up to be a classic Nevada heap-leachable oxide deposit.

HUNTING A GIANT AT SWIFT
If Selena is a base hit in baseball terms, think of Swift as a home-run swing. It’s a Carlin-type gold project about 7 kilometres northwest of Nevada Gold Mines’ Cortez mine complex, which hosts about 35 million ounces at 3.08 g/t gold. The neighbourhood hosts large, high-grade Tier 1 deposits, which is what Ridgeline is looking for. Only five deep drill holes have ever tested the Lower Plate target rocks on the 50-square-kilometre property.

A three-hole, 2,413-metre drill program completed late last year hit widespread skarn alteration within favourable host rocks and produced some sniffs of low-grade gold and high-grade silver mineralization, including 0.2 metres grading 0.22 g/t Au and 860 g/t Ag. It’s an indication that Ridgeline drilled into the guts of the intrusive heat source — the largest Carlin-type gold deposits are associated with buried intrusives, Peters says. “If you’re too close, the gold won’t precipitate out. We now know where we are in the system, and we know where we’re going next.”

Two of the three deep holes intersected the favourable Wenban formation. It sounds like something out of a Star Wars movie, but Wenban is considered the primary host rock for much of the gold in Nevada’s Cortez trend, including 15 million ounces in NGM’s Goldrush deposit. Data from the Phase 1 drilling will help Ridgeline vector in on higher-grade gold mineralization in the Phase 2 program.

CARLIN-EAST/BELL CREEK CATALYSTS: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Barrick CEO Mark Bristow has identified Nevada as “one of our main hunting grounds” and Barrick’s moves at the Fourmile discovery show those weren’t idle words. The company has rapidly advanced Fourmile — north of Goldrush — since announcing a maiden Inferred resource of 700,000 ounces of gold grading 18.58 g/t (Fourmile is outside the NGM joint venture).

In resource exploration as in real estate, it’s all about “location, location, location.” And Barrick has been aggressively exploring on the doorstep of both Carlin-East and Bell Creek. Last year NGM intercepted 21.3 metres grading 35.3 g/t gold at its North Leeville target, north of the Leeville underground gold mine. That’s just 3 kilometres away from Ridgeline’s Carlin-East boundary, along the Leeville structural corridor.

Barrick-controlled NGM is also exploring aggressively just to the west of Ridgeline’s Bell Creek project. Assays are pending on a deep hole NGM drilled at its Sinkhole Breccia target just 250 metres to the west of Bell Creek. It’s valuable land — a 2020 Laurentian Bank analyst report on Ely Gold Royalties (ELY-V) assigns a US$41-million valuation to Ely’s REN royalties, which lie directly adjacent to Ridgeline’s 100% owned Bell Creek property, on the west.

Peters plans to drill both Carlin-East and Bell Creek but will watch Barrick’s next moves in the neighbourhood and proceed accordingly, while Ridgeline builds ounces at Selena and drills for a high-grade gold discovery at Swift.

Ridgeline Minerals (RDG-V, RDGMF-OTC)
Price: 0.36
Shares out: 48.1 million (58.5M fully diluted)
Market cap: $17.3 million

Disclosure: James Kwantes was compensated for the writing and distribution of this article. Kwantes owns shares of Ridgeline Minerals, purchased in the 22-cent financing round, the 45-cent IPO and the public market. This article is for information purposes and should not be considered investment advice. All investors need to perform their own due diligence.

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Kodiak Copper site visit: “It’s a good start”

by James Kwantes
Editor and publisher,
Resource Opportunities

Site visit: Kodiak Copper MPD project (October 17, 2020)

Sent to Resource Opportunities Premium Subscribers pre-market on Oct. 20

Dear subscriber,

My final site visit of the year — on Saturday, Oct. 17 — took me to Kodiak Copper’s MPD project and core facility outside Merritt, in the heart of southwestern B.C.’s copper porphyry country. It’s a three-hour drive from Vancouver. En route, the snow was already flying at the summit of the Coquihalla Highway pass — elevation 1,244 metres (4,000 feet). But at site, the only winter weather to be found was a chill in the air. That’s typical for the area, which usually experiences hot summers and mild winters with minimal snowfall.

The favourable weather — and year-round exploration possibilities — is one of the reasons Kodiak has further upside potential, even from these relatively lofty levels. Kodiak has added about $80 million in market capitalization since I touched on it in the August 16 letter, and about $40 million since the Sept. 3 Flash Alert. As the sector has lagged, the stock has run hard on the high-grade copper-gold intercept announced on September 3. KDK is no longer cheap and there are expectations built in. There’s also still much to like. I have averaged up twice since the initial 43-cent purchase outlined in the Aug. 16 letter — at $1.65 and at current levels.

The site visit started at Kodiak’s temporary core shack on the outskirts of Merritt. The company is rapidly outgrowing the facility, where it shares space with a salvage yard. The core shack was formerly used by both Westhaven Gold and Kaizen Exploration. Kodiak is looking for a more suitable processing and storage site as the metres build at MPD.

Both chairman Chris Taylor and president/CEO Claudia Tornquist were present, along with Discovery Group founder John Robins, analysts and Kodiak geologists (Taylor had to leave early to fly to Red Lake). Hole 4 — which returned 282 metres of 0.7% copper and 0.49 g/t gold, including 45.7m of 1.41% Cu and 1.46 g/t Au — was in the core boxes. The highlight intersection was heavily magnetic — copper occurs in the magnetite-rich rock.

Kodiak CEO Claudia Tornquist and chairman Chris Taylor (third from right) at the core facility outside Merritt.

Kodiak is now drilling hole 8 and assays are pending on holes 3, 5, 6 and 7 (5,316 metres have been drilled in 7 holes this year). The company has described hole 5 as carrying “similar porphyry-style sulphide mineralization” as hole 4. But the strong correlation between magnetics and copper mineralization offer hints of good assays to come — holes 5, 6 and 7 all have significant magnetic signatures. The gold values, in turn, seem to be closely correlated with the copper — at least in hole 4.

On Oct. 22, Kodiak reported complete assays for the remainder of hole 4 as well as for hole 2. Hole 4 intersected 535.1 metres of 0.49% copper and 0.29 g/t gold, or 0.76% CuEq, starting from about 200 metres downhole. Hole 2 assays were lower-grade, intersecting 642 metres grading 0.21% Cu and 0.06 g/t Au from 173 metres downhole, including 32.8 metres of 0.46% Cu and 0.12 g/t Au.

Chris Taylor is getting quite good at formulating new geological interpretations that drive discovery and create shareholder value. The acquisition of Man, Prime and Dillard (MPD) came together after a trip he took to the area looking for porphyry projects, his specialty (Taylor worked as a project geologist for B.C. porphyry operator Imperial Metals for five years).

At MPD, 129 historical drill holes and 25,780 metres had been drilled across the properties by operators including Rio Tinto and Newmont. But few of those holes went below 200 metres vertical depth. Taylor saw deeper drilling as key at the property, which has copper showings at surface and in drilling and trenches over a 10-sq-km area. The Gate Zone discovery hole (MPD-19-003), announced Jan. 16 to little fanfare, hit 102 metres of 0.53 Cu and 0.16 g/t Au — the best hole in the 50-year history of the property. The highlight intercept in hole 4 improved upon that by a wide margin.

The consolidation of the Man, Prime and Dillard properties followed a familiar script, especially for Great Bear shareholders — Taylor seeing value where others did not. As he put it during the site visit, “MPD was a great project to buy because everyone thought it was shit.” Kodiak paid just $200,000 plus 1.8 million shares of Dunnedin, the predecessor company, to secure MPD. Consider: Friedland-backed Kaizen Discovery pivoted away from their neighbouring Aspen Grove copper porphyry project after a modest 2016 drill program. Kaizen recently announced plans to restart exploration; it’s still listed as a “non-core project” available for sale or joint venture on their website.

(At Great Bear, Taylor and Bob Singh saw potential where others — including Mark O’Dea, who gave up on the property — did not. Great Bear paid $210,000 and 100,000 GBR shares to secure 100% of Dixie including royalties.)

Kodiak is cashed up to expand the drill program in 2021, after closing a $12.7-million private placement that saw neighbour Teck come in with a 9.9% strategic investment. “It’s a good start” had been the Teck geologist’s poker-faced assessment after a close inspection of the core. Teck is mining 0.29% copper at its Highland Valley Copper mine — Canada’s largest open-pit copper operation — about 90 kilometres north of MPD. To the south, Copper Mountain is mining 0.25% copper.

Kodiak now has about $15 million in the treasury, derisking it on the dilution front. The company also retains the Mohave porphyry project in Arizona and the Kahuna diamond project in Nunavut. There are also 2.3 million Brixton Metals (BBB-V) shares Kodiak picked up by selling a non-core asset in the Golden Triangle in August.

The MPD project is about a 45-minute highway drive from Merritt, through Douglas Lake Ranch country (the ranch, one of North America’s largest, also has grazing rights at MPD). On the way to site, on a sidewalk in Merritt, we passed a campaigning politician who knows the importance of mining even though he doesn’t talk about it much: B.C. NDP premier John Horgan.

The Man, Prime and Dillard target areas that have seen most of the historical drilling are located in close proximity to each other on the property’s northwestern quarter. There are several areas with outcropping malachite and azurite, copper indicator minerals. The Gate Zone discovery is close to Prime, which is in proximity to Missezula Lake. There is a cottage community at the south end of the lake that is located on MPD ground (it’s visible on the satellite image if you Google “Missezula Lake”). It’s not a fatal flaw. But the lake and cottages are close enough that if an open-pit mine is built at MPD that incorporates Gate Zone, those properties would likely have to be bought out.

Kodiak now has core from each of the three target zones, and there are similarities. Core from Dillard, two kilometres away, looks similar to core from the upper part of the Gate Zone holes. MPD is shaping up to be a multi-zone copper porphyry system with significant gold values. Next Kodiak plans to test a 1.5-km by 300-metre copper in soil anomaly coincident with a mag low that runs south of the current drilling, followed by Gate Zone analogues elsewhere on the property. Taylor told us the Gate Zone reminds him of the Northeast Zone at the Mt. Polley porphyry mine operated by his former employer, Imperial Metals. The copper/gold-rich NE Zone was what allowed Imperial to put Mt. Polley back into production after it had been mothballed.

Gold prospects on the eastern portion of the property — which hosts epithermal/mesothermal mineralization — could be a potential spinout down the road, if Kodiak can delineate an economic ore body at MPD. Northeast of the MPD property is the Elk gold mine, which produced 50,000 ounces of gold grading 3 oz/t from surface. Elk was sold to a private company last year by Ross Beaty’s Equinox Gold for $10 million.

Drill results will drive Kodiak’s share price trajectory and there is reason to believe pending assays will continue to be good. MPD carries a hefty valuation for an early-stage copper drill play. But with early copper values that are multiples of grades being mined in the neighbourhood at Copper Mountain and Highland Valley — plus gold, this is no run-of-the-mill copper play. Kodiak ticks a lot of boxes:

— Road-accessible property in a mining-friendly area (low drill costs);
— $15 million in the treasury, with no need to finance;
— Tight share structure with strong management and Discovery Group backing;
— The makings of a high-grade copper-gold porphyry deposit, or a multi-zone system.

Kodiak Copper (KDK-V, KDKCF-OTC)
Price: $2.29
Shares out: 44.2 million (51.8M f-d)
Market cap: $101.2 million

Disclosure: James Kwantes owns shares of Kodiak Copper and Kodiak paid a fee for reprint and distribution rights. All investors need to complete their own due diligence on every investment including Kodiak, a high-risk junior mining equity. This Flash Alert is for information purposes and should not be considered financial advice.

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Fremont Gold gears up to drill for discovery at Griffon in Nevada

By James Kwantes
Resource Opportunities

Nevada is known as “The Silver State,” a nod to the 1859 discovery of the Comstock Lode. That rich silver endowment led to Nevada’s statehood, and profits from silver mining helped the North come out on top in the American Civil War.

But the discovery of the state’s rich gold districts, including the Carlin and Cortez trends, a century later quickly made Nevada one of the world’s premier gold mining jurisdictions. Those two districts alone have a combined gold endowment of more than 250 million ounces (production + reserves). And gold is the precious metal that remains Nevada’s largest export by dollar value.

However, U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that Nevada’s gold output is slipping. Gold exports of about $4.9 billion in 2018 dropped to $2.7 billion last year, a 45% decrease.

And Nevada is not the only gold-rich jurisdiction with a declining production profile. New discoveries are needed to replace the ounces being mined. And one of the best places to look for gold is on projects that have been orphaned by larger companies or by exploration companies that have shifted their focus elsewhere.

The latter is the story with the past-producing Griffon project at the southern end of Nevada’s Cortez trend. Fremont Gold (FRE-V, USTDF-OTCBB) purchased Griffon and its 89 unpatented mining claims from Liberty Gold (LGD-T) in December 2019, then raised $1.48 million to drill it. The project was orphaned by Liberty (formerly Pilot Gold), which is drilling out its Black Pine oxide gold project in Idaho. Griffon is southeast of Fiore Gold’s (F-V) Pan mine and Contact Gold’s (C-V) past-producing Green Springs heap-leach gold mine.


Fremont plans to drill 2,000 metres at Griffon, beginning in June. Twenty-six drill sites are currently permitted and the project is bonded. Fremont plans to drill a number of untested targets in the hopes of making a new discovery at Griffon.

Griffon was first drilled in 1988. By 1997 two oxide gold deposits had been delineated, at Discovery Ridge and Hammer Ridge. Over the next three years, Alta operated as a small producer, mining oxide gold from those deposits at average grades of 1.03 g/t in a heap-leach operation. That’s well above average grades of 0.6 to 0.7 g/t being heap-leach mined at typical Nevada oxide gold operations.

Alta’s focus was production, not exploration. The company did not thoroughly explore the property and almost all of the holes they drilled were less than 100 metres deep. Fremont has assembled a crack team of geologists to narrow down targets at Griffon:

  • Clay Newton, Fremont’s VP Exploration and a Phd structural geologist who brings fresh eyes to the project
  • Andy Wallace, Ph.D., a Carlin expert and co-discoverer of five Nevada gold mines as a principal of Cordex
  • Jamie Robertson, Ph.D., Alta’s former exploration manager and a regional expert on Nevada’s southern Cortez trend.

Target areas at Griffon include the untested three-kilometre long Blackrock fault to the east of the Hammer Ridge deposit (one of the two deposits mined by Alta Gold Corp.), the Pilot Shale horizon, and a number of geochemical anomalies. In addition, potential remains in and around the two past-producing open pits.

Clay Newton, Fremont Gold’s VP Exploration, checks out a jasperoid outcrop, an alteration style associated with Carlin-type gold mineralization, at Fremont’s Griffon property on the southern Cortez trend.

Drilling by Alta in an area southwest of Hammer Ridge hints at the property’s potential. Alta hit near-surface gold mineralization in many holes, including 57.9 metres of 0.86 g/t gold. Other drill holes in this area — all of them within 100 metres of surface — included:

  • 25.9 metres of 1.1 g/t Au
  • 36.6m of 0.93 g/t
  • 24.4m of 0.79 g/t

Last summer, Fremont sold its Gold Canyon project to McEwen Mining for 300,000 McEwen common shares in order to focus on securing more advanced-stage assets. The company’s first move was to option Cobb Creek from Contact Gold. Located in Elko county, Nevada, Cobb Creek is an advanced project with a historical gold resource that hasn’t been drilled since 1992. Although Cobb is an intriguing exploration project, Fremont plans to focus on Griffon this exploration season. The company also has the North Carlin, Hurricane and Goldrun projects in Nevada.

Gold is holding steady above US$1,600 an ounce and doing its job as a safe haven. The precious metal is also, increasingly, a buttress against the impending waves of money-printing as governments globally respond to economic paralysis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gold producers continue to rely on exploration companies to find the next economic ore bodies. That increases the appeal of well-managed juniors poised to create shareholder value with the drill. Fremont Gold fits the bill as it prepares to drill for discovery at Griffon. Insiders have been adding to their stakes, in both the public market and private placements. I have also been buying shares at these price levels.

Fremont Gold (FRE-V, USTDF-OTCBB)
Price: 0.06
Shares out: 81.5 million (121.2M f-d)
Market cap: $4.9 million

Disclosure: I own Fremont Gold shares and Fremont is one of three Resource Opportunities sponsor companies. Fremont is a speculative, high-risk exploration stock that may not be suitable for all investors. This article is not intended as financial advice and all investors should conduct their own due diligence and/or consult an investment advisor.

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Genesis Metals drills for high-grade gold in Quebec

Drilling later this year will test new targets identified by last year’s property-wide soil sampling.

By James Kwantes
Resource Opportunities

For veteran speculators, the latest hits to junior mining share prices feels like deja vu all over again. Sentiment is gloomy and market capitalizations are depressed. But gold in U.S. dollar terms is still up more than 25% year-over-year. And US$1,500 gold translates to more than $2,150 Canadian, an exceptional price for Canadian projects whose expenses are measured mostly in loonies.

Gold producers that deplete their reserves with every shift and every scoop still rely on junior exploration companies to find the deposits that will replenish their ore. Most juniors, meanwhile, had yet to respond even BEFORE the Coronavirus corrections — which has further pummelled the sector. Expectations are very low, along with share prices.

For exploration companies with strong management and backing, a flush treasury and potential for high-grade discoveries, it’s not a bad setup. Genesis Metals (GIS-V, GGISF-OTC) fits the bill. The Discovery Group company has $3.5 million in the treasury to drill its flagship Chevrier project in Quebec’s Chibougamau mining district. Chevrier is located in the eastern portion of the prolific Abitibi Greenstone Belt (180M oz of historical gold production).

Genesis is drilling an initial 2,500 metres (10 holes) at Chevrier, part of a planned 8,000-metre drill program this year. The initial program is designed to tap into high-grade shoots within the Chevrier Main zone deposit, expanding the higher-grade domain. Genesis’s market cap of about $7.9 million is backstopped by existing gold resources at Chevrier totalling 395,000 ounces Indicated grading 1.45 g/t Au and 297,000 ounces Inferred at an average grade of 1.33 g/t, at the Chevrier Main and East zones.

The company has already identified high-grade areas within the deposit — assays announced on January 22, 2018 included 8.73 g/t over 21.35 metres and 4.26 g/t over 19.4 metres at the Main Zone. But those results went unappreciated with gold trading at US$1,330 an ounce on its way down to $1,200. Later this year, Genesis plans to test targets elsewhere on the 295-sq-km property that were identified through last year’s property-wide glacial till survey.

Overseeing the exploration program is new CEO David Terry, an economic geologist who was appointed President and CEO on Dec. 2, 2019 (Jeff Sundar remains as Executive Director). Terry obtained a PhD in Geology from Western University in Ontario. He’s also well-schooled in the vagaries of bull and bear market mining cycles, through decades in the industry running projects — both large and small — for majors and helming explorecos. Terry is currently a director of several active exploration companies including Golden Arrow Resources, Aftermath Silver and Great Bear Resources. Great Bear, also a Discovery Group company, is drilling high-grade gold along kilometres of strike at its Dixie project in Red Lake, Ontario.

For Terry, the Great Bear directorship is a kind of return to Red Lake. His first summer job in exploration included mapping and sampling in the prolific district for a large mining company called Goldfields while he attended Western in the 1980s. He later worked for several years as a contract geologist with Cominco (which sponsored his PhD thesis) in Alaska, followed by a stint with Hemlo Gold exploring back in the Abitibi.

Geologist David Terry, the Genesis Metals CEO, in the field at a gold project in central Ecuador.

After obtaining his PhD, Terry worked for Westmin Resources then Boliden, as a geologist and project manager. When Boliden exited Canada with the mining sector in a post Bre-X slump, Terry took a position as a Regional Geologist for the B.C. Geological Survey in southeastern B.C. for three years. He spoke at the closing ceremony for Teck’s legendary Sullivan mine, which operated for nearly a century and produced 160 million tonnes grading 12% zinc/lead and 67 g/t silver. Since 2004 he has worked in management, director and advisory roles with a number of juniors exploring and advancing precious and base metal projects in both North American and a number of Latin American countries.

Terry joined the Great Bear board in July 2016, before the Dixie project was the company’s flagship. Great Bear’s mineralized LP fault is now recognized as one of the best gold discoveries of recent years, globally. But Terry remembers when the team operated in relative obscurity, with GBR shares trading for dimes not dollars.

As for Genesis, adopting a go-slow approach in 2019 laid the groundwork for an active 2020. Instead of drilling in the depths of a bear market, former President and CEO Jeff Sundar focused on building out the team and raising a war chest. Genesis joined the Discovery Group of companies and added Discovery principals John Robins and Jim Paterson as strategic advisors. The Discovery Group has an impressive record of wins in recent years, including the $520-million sale of Kaminak Gold to Goldcorp and the $117-million sale of Northern Empire Resources to Coeur. Rob Carpenter, the cofounder and former CEO of Kaminak, also came on as a strategic advisor.

Genesis’s successful financings were done in conjunction with a 5-for-1 share consolidation and the appointment of Terry as CEO. Rollbacks have a bad reputation — and rightly so — but consolidations done in conjunction with management changes and large financings can set the stage for success. Great Bear is another example of a successful rollback, its tight share structure helping to propel the stock post-discovery.

Chevrier is located in a prolific district of high-grade gold resources. Directly to the southwest is the Monster Lake gold discovery, where JV partners IAMGOLD and TomaGold have identified an Inferred resource of 433,000 ounces at 12.14 g/t gold. At the Nelligan project further southwest, Vanstar has delineated 3.1 million ounces of gold (Inferred) at about 1 g/t but last year hit 6 metres grading 56.46 g/t Au. IAMGOLD recently increased its interest in the project to 75%.

South of Chevrier, the Joe Mann gold mine produced 1.2 million ounces of gold at 8.26 g/t, as well as silver and copper. Infrastructure is excellent at Chevrier: a highway and power line runs through the property and the regional airport is a few minutes drive to the north. 

With Discovery Group backing, a strong management and technical team, and a full treasury to drill high-grade gold targets at Chevrier, Genesis has laid the foundation for success. And high-grade gold discoveries get rewarded by the market, even in these tumultuous times for juniors.

Genesis Metals (GIS-V)
Price: 0.18
Shares outstanding: 43.76 million (59M fully diluted)
Market cap: $7.9 million

Disclosure: James Kwantes owns Genesis Metals shares and Genesis is one of three Resource Opportunities sponsor companies. Genesis is a speculative, high-risk exploration stock that may not be suitable for all investors. This article is not intended as financial advice and all investors should conduct their own due diligence and/or consult an investment advisor.

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Cashed-up explorer prepares to drill large gold-copper porphyry target

By James Kwantes
Editor and publisher, Resource Opportunities

Speculating in junior mining equities is a dangerous — and sometimes extremely lucrative — game. Some of the key qualities that lay the groundwork for shareholder value creation in an exploration play are:

  • Serially successful management
  • High-quality projects
  • Stable jurisdictions
  • The right commodity, at the right time
  • Tight share structure.

Discovery drill plays carry both the most risk and potential reward. A discovery can create tremendous — even life-changing — shareholder value. But it’s only the drill — aka the “truth machine” — that will determine whether an economic ore body lurks beneath the surface. Orestone Mining Corp. (ORS-V) is funded to drill two large porphyry targets in British Columbia and Chile and has positioned itself for success by ticking the above boxes.

Next comes a drill program at Orestone’s Captain property, which is host to a large gold-copper porphyry target near Centerra’s Gold’s Mount Milligan copper-gold mine northwest of Prince George. Orestone plans to drill between up to 1,250 metres in 5 holes at its Admiral target. The project is located on flat terrain and accessible via logging roads, making year-round exploration possible.

Mobilizing the drill at the Captain project.

I initiated coverage on Orestone at 7 cents in Resource Opportunities on Sept. 26, 2018 and the stock has since traded as high as 25 cents. Shares now trade at 12.5 cents, giving the company a market capitalization of about $3 million — very modest compared to other cashed-up, high-potential drill plays. Orestone has about $700,000 in the treasury and is raising another $500,000 in flow-through funds to drill Captain. The company is selling 16-cent units, each of which includes one flow-through share and half a warrant (one-year, 22-cent).

Orestone has a clean share structure, with a serially successful management team advancing two high-calibre projects in neighbourhoods that host very large mines. Let’s take a closer look.

MANAGEMENT

Orestone’s chairman and CEO David Hottman and Gary Nordin, an Orestone director and senior consulting geologist, have deep industry experience with successful companies including Bema Gold, Eldorado Gold, Nevada Pacific Gold and Polaris Materials. All of those companies were acquired by larger companies except for Eldorado Gold.

Nordin, a co-founding director and VP of Bema, has been directly involved in several multi-million-ounce gold discoveries, including Refugio in Chile (6-8M oz). He was also a co-founder, director and VP of Eldorado, where he was involved in the Kisladag discovery in Turkey (12M oz) and La Colorada in Mexico (1M oz). Hottman owns about 5.3% of Orestone’s outstanding shares; Nordin owns 4.2%.

The latest team member is Bruce Winfield, appointed president on June 3, and I recently stopped by Orestone’s modest Vancouver offices to meet him. Winfield is a Spanish-speaking geologist who got his first taste of Latin America working on the Cerro Colorado porphyry deposit in Panama for Texas Gulf. He later spent three years working in Spain, including opening a Boliden office in Madrid.

When Winfield (right) returned to North America, Latin America was opening up to mining and his language and operations skills were in demand. He spent seven years working for Greenstone Resources, where he helped acquire and develop four deposits that later became producing mines. One of those was La Libertad gold mine in Nicaragua, the first asset sold after the defeat of the Sandinista government.

La Libertad later became one of B2Gold’s foundational assets (B2Gold recently sold La Libertad to Calibre Mining).

Winfield also spent two years working with Hottman and Nordin at Eldorado Gold, where he was VP Exploration. The focus during his first year there was to increase the resources at the La Colorada mine in Sonora, Mexico to expand production. La Colorada is now owned by Argonaut Gold.

During his second year at Eldorado, the company bought Gencor’s Brazilian and Turkish assets, which included nearly 24,000 square miles of exploration land including several small resources. Persistent exploration subsequently yielded the prolific Kisladag gold porphyry discovery. Winfield was most recently president and CEO of Defiance Silver (DEF-V), a Mexico-focused silver exploration company.

Orestone’s bench strength extends to the board. Director Julia Aspillaga is a Chilean national who played a key role in the development of the Refugio deposit for Bema Gold and also brought the group the Cerro Casale project, where a mineral reserve and resource of more than 23 million ounces of gold, 5.8 billion pounds of copper and 58 million ounces of silver has been drilled off. Barrick Gold and Newmont-Goldcorp are now 50-50 partners on the project.

Daniels is a mining engineer who graduated from the Colorado School of Mines and has worked in 13 countries and more than 50 projects with companies including Gustavson Associates and Caterpillar. Daniels worked on the startup of Bema Gold’s Champagne gold mine in Idaho, the company’s first producing asset, in 1989-90.

PROJECTS

The flagship Captain project in northern British Columbia is a gold-copper porphyry target about 30 kilometres (18.6 miles) south of Centerra Gold’s open-pit Mount Milligan copper-gold mine. With drill permits in hand, Orestone is mobilizing the rig and plans to start drilling later this week, once the flow-through financing closes.

During the last drill program, in 2013, hole C13-03 hit a three-metre xenolith fragment of highly altered rock grading 1.9 g/t gold and 0.226% copper over three metres, within a post-mineral dyke.

Orestone’s Gary Nordin believes that fragment is a transported piece of a 2-kilometre by 1-kilometre monzonite porphyry body that correlates with an Induced Polarization (IP) anomaly. The drill will target that interpreted mineralized body with five initial drill holes and about 1,000 to 1,250 metres. The modest program has the potential to hit “pay dirt” — Mount Milligan to the north has proven and probable reserves of 4.7 million ounces of gold and 1.8 billion pounds of copper.

Geologists Gary Nordin, left, and Barney Bowen check out historic core.

The Resguardo project is an 11.3-square-mile copper-gold porphyry target that covers historic oxide copper workings northeast of Copiapo, Chile. A large IP chargeability anomaly under the oxide copper suggests there could be a sulphide copper porphyry at depth — theory that has never been tested. That’s the target for Orestone’s planned drill program.There are several giant gold and copper-gold deposits within 100 kilometres of Resguardo, including El Salvador (CODELCO), Cerro Casale (Barrick/Newmont-Goldcorp), Candelaria (Lundin Mining) and Maricunga (Kinross).

STABLE JURISDICTION

British Columbia has its detractors, but the province remains a favourable place to operate large mines. Australian gold giant Newcrest evidently thinks so, having recently purchased a 70% interest in Imperial Metals’ Red Chris mine for US$807 million. So does Teck, which operates copper and coal mines in B.C. and recently bought a 14% stake in B.C. copper-gold explorer Sun Metals.

As for Chile, the nation produces up to a third of the world’s copper and plenty of gold. Much of the metals come from giant deposits — of 5-30M oz gold and/or more than 5 million tonnes of contained copper. Chile is recognized as one of the most stable mining jurisdictions in the world. And in director Julia Aspillaga, Orestone has a capable operator with excellent in-country connections.

COMMODITY

The gold market has come alive and looks better than it has in years — since 2013, to be precise. And back then, gold was on its way down after hitting US$1,900 an ounce. Copper has been weaker — along with the other base metals — on U.S.-China trade wars and growing fears about the health of the global economy. The civilization metal appears to be basing at the US$2.60 level. Copper’s long-term demand case remains intact, however, and a supply crunch is looming as legacy mines deplete their reserves and begin to shut down.

Orestone’s timing could be fortuitous. The company is focusing on a deposit type — gold-copper porphyrys — that is expected to produce an increasing amount of the world’s gold, according to a July 2014 article in the Society of Economic Geologists newsletter. Copper-gold porphyrys have only been mined since the 20th century. Orogenic gold deposits have been mined for thousands of years, while the Witwatersrand has been producing gold since the late 19th century. Production in the rich South African gold belt — an important gold source — has steadily declined since 1970.

Orestone has two planned drill programs in “elephant country” for porphyry deposits. With drilling success, the company projects could eventually contribute to global gold and copper production in already established mining camps. Owning Orestone shares gives you exposure to two large exploration plays and the potential for a dramatic rerating from this $3-million valuation.

Orestone Mining Corp. (ORS-V)
Price: 0.125
Shares outstanding: 23.8 million (39.6M fully diluted)
Market cap: $3 million

Disclosure: James Kwantes owns Orestone shares and the company is a sponsor of Resource Opportunities. Orestone is a lightly traded, high-risk junior exploration stock. This is not financial advice and all investors need to perform their own due diligence.

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Genesis hunts for high-grade gold at Chevrier

Recent discoveries, M&A in the Chibougamau mining district

By James Kwantes
Resource Opportunities

Genesis Metals is one of three Resource Opportunities sponsor companies.

The history of major metals discoveries is rife with stories of deposits that were only uncovered when geologists looked beyond existing mineralization systems, or considered new models. Sometimes the best discoveries occur when exploration takes place off the beaten path — even when there are gold ounces underneath that path. An open mind sometimes opens doors, to both new discoveries and greater shareholder value.

For example, Ivanhoe’s Kamoa-Kakula copper deposit in the Democratic Republic of Congo was already one of the world’s richest and largest copper discoveries when company geologists decided to look further afield. In March 2017 they drilled a new discovery — Kakula West — 4 kilometres west of existing mineralization, making an already world-class deposit even richer.

More recently, Discovery Group company Great Bear Resources (GBR-V) drilled the Bear-Rimini discovery at its Dixie project in Red Lake, Ontario. Great Bear had been intercepting plenty of high-grade gold mineralization at its Hinge and Dixie Limb Zones, with a very pleasing 1-year stock chart to match. But the company’s push beyond areas of known mineralization led Great Bear to hit pay dirt with Bear-Rimini, drilling multiple shallow high-grade intercepts a full 2.5 kilometres away from existing gold zones.

Genesis Metals (GIS-V) has a long way to go before being mentioned in the same breath as Ivanhoe or Great Bear. But the company is utilizing a similar exploration ethos at its Chevrier gold project in Quebec’s Abitibi Greenstone Belt, 35 km southwest of Chibougamau. Genesis, also part of the Discovery Group, is in the middle of a property-wide till geochemical survey at the claims package. It’s an exploration method that has paid off for IAMGOLD, which is drilling the nearby Monster Lake and Nelligan high-grade gold discoveries with its JV partners.

Genesis recently expanded its Chevrier holdings to 275 square kilometres. The goal of the program is to identify high-grade drill targets in new areas, with a secondary focus on increasing grade and tonnage at existing deposits. Genesis’s market capitalization of $7.45 million is underpinned by a resource estimate of 395,000 ounces Indicated grading 1.45 g/t gold and 297,000 ounces Inferred grading 1.33 g/t (0.5 g/t cutoff for open pit, 0.95 g/t for underground). Genesis geologists believe there is yet-uncovered high-grade gold mineralization at Chevrier. 

“The idea is to bring in fresh eyes to do systematic property-wide exploration, for the very first time,” said Genesis President Jeff Sundar, who was recently appointed CEO in a management shuffle that saw Adrian Fleming appointed chairman of the board (replacing Brian Groves). Fleming has been involved in discoveries around the world and was CEO and cofounder of Underworld Resources, which discovered and defined the White Gold deposit in Yukon. Underworld sold to Kinross for $138 million in 2010.

North Vancouver-based Vector Geological Solutions is running the property-wide soil sampling  program. Vector and partner IOS are using a track-mounted sampling machine to take soil samples at 200-metre lines across the entire Chevrier property. The Fancamp Deformation Zone, the belt that hosts Chevrier, used to be covered by glaciers. Knowing the direction of the ice sheets and interpreting the shape and nature of the gold grains in the till will be key to evaluating the survey results. Geological mapping, prospecting and geophysics will follow, along with a potential drill program later this year.

For years, Quebec has been recognized as one of the best mining jurisdictions, globally. The province is keen to maintain that reputation and has invested billions of dollars into Plan Nord, the extensive infrastructure plan designed to open up the province’s vast north to mining and industry. As for Chevrier, the project is located in a mining-friendly area near major highways and a rail line, with an airport nearby. That’s a tick in the infrastructure box.

Quebec’s support extends to financial assistance for companies doing mining exploration work in the province. The Genesis exploration program is being funded by a $520,000 private placement that closed on May 30. Three Quebec government-sponsored investment funds participated for $350,000 of that total.

The Chibougamau district is heating up along with the gold price, which is trading at about US$1,400 an ounce but has shown strength of late. Encouragingly, Vector’s exploration methodology mirrors tools used by other companies that have successfully identified high-grade gold discoveries nearby. Those include the Monster Lake gold deposit southwest of Chevrier, which already hosts 433,000 ounces of gold (Inferred) at 12.14 g/t Au. Operator IAMGOLD and JV partners TomaGold (45%) and Quinto (5%) continue to hit intercepts above 20 g/t at Monster. 

Vanstar’s Nelligan project, about 25 kilometres southwest of Chevrier, is also generating excitement. The latest assays at Nelligan, where IAMGOLD can earn up to an 80% interest, included 6 metres grading 56.5 g/t gold and 7.7 metres grading 7.02 g/t.

And there is an ongoing takeover battle between Osisko and Agnico Eagle that will result in a new neighbour for Chevrier. Osisko looks to have the upper hand: Chantrell Ventures, an Osisko vehicle that will be renamed O3 Mining, recently sweetened its bid for Alexandria Minerals. The move was in response to a hostile offer from Agnico, with both companies eyeing Alexandria’s Val d’Or land package. Alexandria also has the Fancamp property bordering Chevrier to the south and the Embry claims to the north.

Genesis has systematically built its land position and its latest acquisition was the Trenholme claims formerly held by Agnico Eagle. The gold mining company had hit mineralization there — including an intercept of 1.5 metres of 4.5 g/t gold — but shifted focus and let the claims lapse. Genesis picked up the block from a prospector who staked the claims after Agnico left.

Dan MacNeil, Vector’s founder and principal consultant, believes there is “probably some low-hanging fruit outside the resource.” MacNeil’s resume includes stints at Barrick Gold and Anglo American and his partner at Vector, Alan Wainwright, was a co-winner of the H.H. “Spud” Huestis prospecting award in 2013 for the exploration and development of Kaminak Gold’s Coffee gold deposit.

One of the other co-winners of the award was geologist Rob Carpenter, who is now a Genesis advisor. Carpenter co-founded and served as the first CEO of Kaminak Gold, which built the multi-million-ounce Coffee deposit and sold for $520 million to Goldcorp in 2016. Carpenter will be assisting Vector and Genesis in the hunt for high-grade at Chevrier.

People are key to any successful junior mining company and Genesis has a rock-solid roster. The Discovery Group has racked up several wins in a bear market, including Kaminak Gold (sold to Goldcorp), Northern Empire Resources (sold to Coeur Mining) and ongoing drilling success at Great Bear. Principals John Robins and Jim Paterson have come on as Genesis advisors and their impressive track records bode well for success. In addition to Carpenter, Genesis also added exploration geologist Garrett Ainsworth and engineer/financier Andrew Ramcharan as advisors late last year.

The company’s market cap of about $7.45 million is underpinned by the Chevrier resource, a majority of which is open-pittable. But it’s the prospect of high-grade gold intercepts on the expanded claims package — in a rich district with proven high-grade mineralization — that probably offers the most upside for Genesis shares.

Genesis Metals (GIS-V, GGISF-OTC)
Price: 0.07
Shares outstanding: 109.3 million (132.2M fully diluted)
Market cap: $7.45 million

Disclosure: Genesis Metals is a Resource Opportunities sponsor company and James Kwantes owns Genesis shares, which makes me biased. Genesis Metals is a high-risk junior exploration stock. All investors need to do their own due diligence and/or consult a qualified investment advisor.

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Avino: Silver mining in Mexico, gold exploration in B.C.

Long before Hollywood directors made it a favoured setting for westerns … before Pancho Villa rose from the poverty of a hacienda there to become an important Revolutionary general … the Mexican state of Durango was a major center for global silver production.

Understanding silver’s role in Mexico – formerly part of “New Spain” – requires stepping back about 500 years. The precious metal has been mined in Durango since the time of the Spanish conquest, more or less continuously. Silver enriched the Spanish king and bolstered the treasury, helping fund wars against European rivals. It also funded a magnificent cathedral that still stands in the state capital, also named Durango. And coins minted from Mexican silver soon became a global currency.

One of the sources of that mineral wealth was Avino, the “mountain of silver” on the eastern flank of the Sierra Madre mountains outside of the city of Durango. It’s an ore body now being mined by Vancouver-based Avino Silver & Gold Mines (ASM-T). Avino produces silver, as well as gold and copper, from two underground mines: the main Avino deposit and San Gonzalo, a small higher-grade deposit about two kilometres away.

The metal remains a major export for Mexico, and Avino’s silver still makes its way around the world. But these days, it’s purchased by a division of Samsung. Samsung C&T purchases all of Avino’s production at spot prices and ships it to smelters in Asia.

Avino was founded by current CEO David Wolfin’s father Lou Wolfin (right), who in 1968 bought a 49% stake in the mothballed Mexican mine — which had closed in 1912 due to the Mexican Revolution. The joint venture put the mine back into production, and Avino later purchased the remaining stake from the Mexican family that owned it. Avino’s 50-year history is one of the features that sets the company apart in a junior mining sector where longevity is typically measured in years, not decades.

CEO David Wolfin’s roots at Avino run deep, too — as a teenager, he worked in the underground mine. Lou Wolfin, who died on March 3, 2017 at age 85, was an entrepreneur and inventor who showed a willingness to invest where others feared to tread. And although the company founder’s path to silver mining in Durango started on Howe Street, it began with a detour through Beverly Hills.

That’s where the elder Wolfin met Mexican entrepreneur Fernando Ysita at a party in the late 1960s. The chance Hollywood encounter led to forays into Mexico and eventually, a major investment. Avino purchased a 49-per-cent stake (the maximum allowed) in 1968 when Mexico re-opened to foreign investment. The company later bought the rest of the mine from the Ysita family.

Lou Wolfin was a contemporary of Murray Pezim and a bit of a legend in Vancouver business circles. A former stockbroker, Wolfin bought a seat on the Vancouver Stock Exchange in 1960 and later opened a Vancouver brokerage house. His entrepreneurial instincts extended far beyond mining – he owned the patent on holograms and developed a keyless door-lock entry system decades before those became common.

But it’s in mining that the elder Wolfin’s legacy is felt most acutely. He wasn’t there to see it, but Avino celebrated its 50-year milestone at the Vancouver Resource and Investment Conference in January. Among those at the party were employees who had been there from the beginning, as well as a contingent from Samsung headquarters in Seoul, South Korea.

The Avino mine on the “mountain of silver.” Durango, Mexico

 

I toured the Avino mines — which also produce gold and copper concentrates — on a site visit to Durango late last year. After flying into the state capital of Durango via Mexico City, we shuttled to the Hotel Gobernador, a hacienda that was formerly a state prison (complete with bullet holes on one of the outer walls). Our group, mostly German investors and analysts, was hosted by Avino CEO David Wolfin, COO Carlos Rodrigues and investor relations manager Jennifer North.

The mine is about an hour-and-a-half drive through towns and a countryside that looks familiar thanks to westerns such as How The West Was Won and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The city of Durango has its own walk of fame featuring Hollywood stars on the sidewalk and several bronze statues including John Wayne — The Duke totes a rifle missing its barrel. (John Candy died of a heart attack in the city in 1994 during a break from filming Wagons East.)

At the mine, silver, gold and copper concentrates are processed using a flotation circuit from ore mined at Avino and San Gonzalo. For the last three years, production has held steady at or above the 2.7 million ounces silver-equivalent produced in 2017 (2.68M AgEq oz in 2016, 3M AgEq oz in 2015).

But a project under construction when I visited and now largely complete should hike that total significantly: the fourth mill circuit. That circuit — with a ball mill purchased from a Quebec mine — is now complete and set to process ore in the first quarter of 2019. The circuit is projected to boost capacity by about 70%, to 2,500 tonnes per day. Once the fourth circuit is commissioned, it will process ore from the San Luis (expansion) area of the Avino mine.

The 4th circuit at Avino’s mill, under construction when I visited, is now complete.

 

Avino announced Q3 2018 production on Oct. 15 and the company’s silver-equivalent production dropped by 7% year-over-year, to 704,429 ounces AgEq. Avino produced 342,151 ounces of silver (down 7% YOY), 2,204 ounces of gold (down 18% YOY) and 992,271 pounds of copper (down 10% YOY). The lower production and declining grades are partly because San Gonzalo is reaching the end of its mine life as Avino transitions to San Luis ore.

About 90 per cent of Avino’s workers live in villages a short drive away from the mine. The local workers have been a constant for the last five centuries – the jobs pay well and are highly coveted. It’s quite a contrast to the fly-in, fly-out contract mining methods at many modern mines. That helps on the community relations front, in addition to Avino’s decades-long presence there.

The Sinaloa cartel operates in Durango but our group travelled without guards or security, and neither is there a visible security presence at the mine. There are signs of a cartel presence if you pay attention, however, in and around Durango. The police station outside the city is built high on a hill and resembles a fortress. A prison we passed also looked seriously secure.

At the mine site, our group of analysts, investors and newsletter writers donned waterproof protective and safety gear and descended into both mines, the temperature rising with each lower level. It was vaguely reminiscent of the silver price, which has fallen more or less consistently and is now stuck at US$14 after running to almost $50 an ounce in April 2011.

 

That’s made it tough for silver producers to make money, and Avino is no exception. The company is also in expansion mode; there are exploration drilling projects at both the Avino mine and at the company’s Bralorne project in British Columbia. Avino is also investigating the economics of processing oxide tailings at Avino. It all costs money, and Avino recently raised US$4.6 million through the sale of 65-cent (US) units.

Each unit consisted of one 65-cent share and a full five-year warrant exercisable at 80 cents. But the financing was announced with shares at 79 cents US, and the below-market pricing prompted a selloff in the stock. In conjunction with Q3 production numbers, released October 15, Avino announced cost-reduction initiatives (capital, operating and administrative) at its operations in Mexico and British Columbia.

There are other examples in Avino’s neighbourhood of how silver’s struggles have hit other producers. Nearby is Coeur Mining’s mothballed Preciosa silver deposit, purchased for $382 million from Orko Silver in 2013. That deal was done with silver at about US$30 an ounce.

Growing production from the fourth circuit gives Avino good leverage to rising silver prices. When that occurs is anybody’s guess, but the silver price has a track record of bouncing hard when it reverses. One measure suggestive of a silver bull market is the gold-silver ratio, which is above 80 and near a historical record. Silver has made outsized returns each time it has reached these levels.

Avino also has leverage to gold at Bralorne, its under-the-radar Canadian project. Bralorne is nestled amid rugged mountains in British Columbia’s South Chilcotin range. It was the epicenter of a major gold mining camp that produced 4.2 million ounces of gold between 1928 and 1971. The three adjacent mines — Bralorne, Pioneer and King — produced extremely high-grade ore. Average head grades were above 0.5 ounces per tonne, or 14 g/t gold — multiples of global mined grades that are now below 1 g/t Au.

Avino’s Bralorne project site: July 2018.

 

Bralorne, where Avino is in the middle of a fully funded 28,000-metre drill program, has the potential to become the flagship and a company maker, if things work out. The project already hosts a state-of-the-art water treatment system and dozens of kilometres of underground workings as well as brand-new mining equipment. The latter equipment — including two scoop trams and a jumbo drill — was purchased as part of a prior plan to start small and ramp up production. The company now plans to focus on expanding the historical resource before starting up a larger mine.

As with Avino, Lou Wolfin played a key role in securing the property, including the historical mine workings. Wolfin bought the Bralorne-Pioneer Mines from Homestake and brought it into Avino in 1990. He got Bralorne running at 100 tonnes per day (in a separate company) but the mine shut down due to low silver prices. Bralorne was brought back into Avino in 2014.

Avino funded the drill program through a $6-million flow-through financing priced at $2.00 (Cdn) per share. The drill program is the most extensive in the project’s history, and includes both exploration and resource drilling. The company is using two drill rigs; assay results should start landing in the first quarter of 2019.

The existing Bralorne resource, announced on Oct. 21, 2016, is 91,528 ounces Measured and Indicated at average grades of 0.33 oz/t gold (9.36 g/t) and 83,900 ounces Inferred at 0.22 oz/t gold (6.2 g/t).

Independent geoscientist Garth Kirkham of Kirkham Geosystems completed the NI 43-101 resource model and also played a major role in designing the current drill program. Kirkham is an award-winning geoscientist known for his resource estimation and 3D modelling work. He has worked extensively with John Robins’ Discovery Group companies, including Kaminak Gold (acquired by Goldcorp) and Bluestone Resources (BSR-V). The drilling follows structural modelling and geological mapping as well as airborne and ground geophysics.

Avino’s investment proposition is that of a stable silver producer with growing, lower-grade deposits and a call option on high-grade gold at Bralorne, where drill assays could provide catalysts for the share price.

Avino Silver and Gold Mines (ASM-T)
Price: 0.75
Shares outstanding: 63.3 million (75.5 million fully diluted)
Market cap: $47.5 million

Disclosure: James Kwantes has been compensated by Avino Silver & Gold Mines to produce this article and Avino paid for costs of the site visit to Mexico. Avino Silver & Gold Mines is not a Resource Opportunities portfolio company. This article is for informational purposes and does not constitute investment advice. All investors need to do their own due diligence.

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Interview: Gren Thomas, the man with the golden hand

by James Kwantes
Editor, Resource Opportunities

October 26, 2018
It’s 1:15 p.m. on a sunny Friday afternoon in Vancouver and I arrive a little early for a downtown meeting with Westhaven Ventures (WHN-V) chairman Gren Thomas. A short elevator ride at Granville and West Hastings takes me to Westhaven’s modest offices on the 10th floor, where I let myself in and drop by CFO Shaun Pollard’s office.

Inside, Pollard and veteran geologist Ed Balon — Westhaven’s technical director — are talking rocks and stocks. Westhaven shares rose 36% on the day to an all-time high close of 94 cents. Teamwork: Balon was key to identifying the Spences Bridge epithermal gold belt, which hosts Shovelnose, outside of Merritt, and Westhaven’s other projects: Prospect Valley, Skoonka and Skoonka North. Pollard runs a tight treasury ship in a sector with its share of (adrift) lifestyle companies.

And it’s at Shovelnose where a high-grade intercept of 17.77 metres of 24.50 g/t gold in hole 14 sent Westhaven shares — which traded between one and three nickels for years until this spring — rocketing from 37 cents to 81 cents on Oct. 16. This is a junior mining market where momentum flows to companies that can hit rich intercepts of high-grade gold. Westhaven has become one of them.

Visible gold in hole 14, from the South Zone at Westhaven’s Shovelnose project

Gren arrives at the office. The soft-spoken mine finder made his reputation and fortune when his Aber Resources discovered Diavik, Canada’s second diamond mine. But these days, it’s mostly gold on his mind.

He comments with a chuckle that he’d had a nap earlier in the day and been surprised when he awoke to see the large stock increase. Making a few million dollars while he slumbers … that’s the new normal for Thomas, who owns (directly and indirectly) almost 30% of Westhaven’s shares. But it’s not like he’s sitting around counting his winnings — the veteran prospector was uncertain and low-balled his stake in the company when asked about it.

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The Westhaven surge is a reversal of fortune for Thomas, who got his share position by bankrolling the company, keeping it afloat through years of struggle and shoestring budgets. Thomas is Westhaven’s chairman and his son Gareth runs the company as president and CEO. Gareth, who was out of the office for interviews, owns 3.3 million shares, a 4.2% stake.

“What are we going to do with all this paper, paper the walls?” Gren says, recalling earlier days of backstopping the operation.

He fills me in on the small, persistent band of believers who were convinced there was high-grade gold at Shovelnose. Central to early-stage exploration was Balon, who discovered Skoonka and found a boulder at Shovelnose in the mid-2000s that ran 100 g/t gold. That was while both projects were still in Strongbow Exploration (SBW-V), where Thomas is also chairman. A 50-metre intercept of 0.5 g/t gold provided further encouragement.

Shaun Pollard, Westhaven CFO (left to right), technical director Ed Balon and CEO Gareth Thomas, atop Shovelnose.

“There were a lot of small programs, but frustrating. We would go back every year thinking we would find more the next year. But we were basically prospecting with a drill. There is lots of cover there, right.”

“We were talking to major companies and they were not remotely interested.”

Westhaven chairman Gren Thomas

The majors are interested now, and so are plenty of others. Gren’s cellphone rings in the pocket of his jacket, which is draped over a chair. He apologizes for pausing the interview and walks over to take the call. It’s Peter Brown, the Canaccord cofounder and Howe Street legend — and Westhaven shareholder. Brown, too, is eager to know when assays for hole 15 will arrive (anytime) and when the next drilling starts (early November).

Hole 14 was the intercept that lit a fire under Westhaven shares. Hole 15, 100 metres southeast of 14, hit a 20-metre quartz vein and contains visible gold. Assays are pending and could land at any time. The core for hole 14 contains ginguro bands, a distinctive black sulphide that is sprinkled with visible gold. The latest core looks very similar to the mineralization at Hishikari (Sumitomo), a Japanese gold mine with some of the world’s highest grades, at 40 g/t gold. Exploration manager Peter Fischl also sees parallels to Kupol (Kinross), a large high-grade mine in Russia’s Far East. Both Hishikari and Kupol are world-class epithermal gold deposits. Shovelnose is a speculative, earlier-stage project, but the potential is tantalizing.

A turning point, Gren relates, was when exploration manager Peter Fischl — attempting to zero in on the “heat zone” — targeted a valley with a creek that hosted heavy clay alteration. Hole SN17-06 intersected 85 metres of 0.52 g/t Au. Higher-grade intercepts followed earlier this year, including 17.7 metres of 3.9 g/t Au.

“We still couldn’t get any interest. We’ve got the boulders, we’ve got the showings, we’ve got these intersections — there’s a lot of gold here.”

“One company even went so far as to say, ‘There are no mines here. Why are there no mines?’ ”

“Well, because nobody has found one yet,” Gren says with a laugh.

Westhaven Ventures (WHN-V)
Price: 0.94
Shares outstanding: 85 million (92 fully diluted)
Market cap: $80 million

There are also new developments in the other two companies where Gren is chairman: Strongbow Exploration (SBW-V) and North Arrow Minerals (NAR-V). He is preparing to fly to the U.K. with Strongbow CEO Richard Williams to work on fundraising and an AIM listing for Strongbow, which is developing the high-grade South Crofty tin project in Cornwall. An Oct. 17 deal with Orion Mine Finance should help on that front — the well-known mining group agreed to finance Strongbow to the tune of US$3 million in conjunction with the AIM listing, which is expected before the end of the year. Thomas owns 5.133 million Strongbow shares, a nearly 6% stake.

There are large pools of capital in London for U.K. mining projects, which Williams and Thomas plan to tap into. There is also renewed interest in Cornwall and tin mining thanks to a popular British television series called Poldark. One participant in a recent tourist walking tour of Cornwall turned out to be a fund manager who was interested in Strongbow and South Crofty.

Strongbow is the “mother ship” of Gren’s three companies: diamond play North Arrow Minerals was spun out of Strongbow in 2007 and Westhaven optioned its Spences Bridge gold belt properties from the company. The deals for Shovelnose and Skoonka have left Strongbow with a 2% royalty on Shovelnose as well as 3.1 million Westhaven shares. Those shares are now worth almost $3 million — a not-insignificant total for a company with a market capitalization of about $14 million. “It’s funny how things morph,” Thomas remarks of Strongbow’s pivot from gold to tin.

Strongbow has a mining permit that is valid until 2017 and the company is currently building a dewatering plant to treat water from the old mine workings. The project was financed by the $7.17-million sale of a 1.5% NSR to major shareholder Osisko Gold Royalties, which owns a 27.5% stake.

Strongbow Exploration (SBW-V)
Price: 0.16
Shares outstanding: 86.6 million (127.4M fully diluted)
Market cap: $13.9 million

As for North Arrow Minerals, the diamond play is awaiting microdiamond and till sample results from Mel in Nunavut, where it discovered the diamondiferous ML-8 kimberlite last year. This season North Arrow drilled a new kimberlite (ML345), expanded on ML-8 and collected 224 kg of kimberlite for microdiamond analysis.

Cut and polished fancy yellow-orangey diamond from Naujaat.

One of the main focuses of North Arrow CEO Ken Armstrong is getting a road permitted from the town of Naujaat to the Q1-4 kimberlite, which hosts a population of valuable yellow-orangey diamonds.

Completion of a road would dramatically cut the costs of collecting a large bulk sample to get a better sense of diamond values at the 12.5-hectare kimberlite, which is near tidewater. A road to the community, which is very supportive of the idea, would also potentially allow the construction of a small test mill in Naujaat.

“A major should take this on, because they take a longer-term view of it,” Gren says of Naujaat. “It’s the perfect place for a mine, near the coast.” He owns more than 10.5 million North Arrow shares, an 11.5% stake.

North Arrow Minerals (NAR-V)
Price: 0.14
Shares outstanding: 92.8 million (128.9M fully diluted)
Market cap: $13 million

“We’re quite confident that we’re doing the right things,” Thomas says of progress at Strongbow and North Arrow. “We just wish the markets would show more interest.”

That’s no longer a problem at Westhaven, with shares sitting just shy of a dollar as investors anticipate assays for hole 15. Warrant exercises have topped up the treasury, which sits north of $1.5 million. That’s enough for the next drill program, which is imminent, and it removes the need to finance under a dollar — something Gren is loathe to do.

While Westhaven’s fortunes have changed, its corporate culture will not, Gren pledges. “Gareth and I were talking about it, and I told him – ‘We under-promise and over-deliver.’ So no bullshit. It’s funner and you get a lot fewer phone calls from angry shareholders.”

There aren’t many of those these days, and Westhaven’s share structure all but ensures higher prices IF the company can keep hitting high-grade gold. Management own about 40% of shares, the Plethora Precious Metals Fund owns 16% and friends and family (including Gren’s daughter Eira Thomas) own another 10-15%. Those high ownership levels keep the supply of shares low during a period of rising demand for the stock.

Related reading: West Vancouver diamond pioneer Gren Thomas still in hunt for gems, Vancouver Sun

Disclosure: James Kwantes owns shares of Westhaven Ventures, Strongbow Exploration and North Arrow Minerals and covers each company in his newsletter, Resource Opportunities. North Arrow is a sponsor of the newsletter. This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. All investors need to do their own due diligence.

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Risk and opportunity: Q&A with Strategic Metals CEO Doug Eaton

By James Kwantes
Resource Opportunities

Strategic Metals is one of three Resource Opportunities sponsor companies.

Strategic Metals CEO Doug Eaton has faced a few grizzly bears in his decades of stomping around the Yukon as an Archer Cathro geologist. And he’s been an exec in the junior exploration business long enough to ride out several bear markets. The key to both experiences: don’t get gored.

The Archer Cathro principal has also seen the other side of the coin, though — the one some junior resource speculators fear may never return. In the summer of 2011, ATAC discovered high-grade gold at Osiris, sending ATAC shares above $10 and Strategic shares above $4. Strategic continues to hold a large ATAC stake, currently 6.9%. Those moves occurred as the gold price approached highs of US$1,900 an ounce.

Current share price levels tell the tale of this bear market, and of the long slide down. Strategic shares trade at 41 cents and ATAC shares are stuck in the 52-cent range, near 52-week lows. ATAC recently announced a maiden resource estimate at Osiris, scene of that 2011 discovery hole, of 1.685 million ounces (Inferred) at 4.23 g/t Au, including a pit-constrained resource of more than 1 million ounces.

Eaton is philosophical about the continuing bear market as Strategic advances its properties (121 wholly owned) and looks for optioners. Lately the company has been doing deals on its cobalt and vanadium projects, as battery metal prices continue to rise amid surging demand and limited supply. And he is very bullish on Rockhaven Resources (RK-V), which recently published a resource update at its Klaza project. Eaton has been adding to his personal Rockhaven stake (currently 9.1% of outstanding shares) and Strategic Metals has also been bulking up, taking their stake to 40.23%.

The number of global ounces at Klaza actually dropped in the resource update, but Rockhaven converted 686,000 ounces from the Inferred to Indicated categories. There was also a significant upgrade in pit-constrained tonnes and grade, including 232,000 ounces of gold (Indicated) at grades of 9.5 g/t in the Western BRX zone. Rockhaven is looking at several processing changes, Eaton noted, including a pre-crushing circuit that would both increase ore grades and reduce processing costs.

I recently caught up with Eaton to talk battery metals, bear markets, and why there isn’t more M&A in this beaten-down sector.

Q: Do mining stocks deserve their poor reputation?

As an industry, we have executed quite badly. We have a tendency to disappoint more frequently than exceed expectations. In exploration, because of the nature of the business, that’s a given. In mining, it shouldn’t be.

Meanwhile, the U.S. markets continue to rise. It’s like stepping onto an escalator, it just keeps going up and up (Facebook shares were recently hit hard, post-interview, after the company missed earnings projections). But it takes such a tiny, tiny reallocation of assets back into resources and it’s going to be like a tsunami force.

Q: What catalysts besides a rising gold price could revive the junior exploration market?

We need buyouts of juniors and for people to redeploy money into the juniors. We’re starting to see it with South32 buying Arizona Mining and Orion Mine Finance buying Dalradian. But the retail market is gone and the big banks won’t touch the sector.

Q: Does Strategic Metals have exposure to the battery metals?

We are working on vanadium and cobalt deals. We went through the digital geochem database looking for cobalt showings. We found 20 properties in total and four with cobalt clusters. We did the same with vanadium and were expecting the same kind of result, but we came up with three strong vanadium properties.

Q: Why are you personally, and why is Strategic Metals, loading up on Rockhaven shares, given the size of your existing stakes? (Amount insiders have spent buying Rockhaven shares in the past 3 months: Eaton $50,000 at 13-15 cents, Strategic Metals $72,000 at 13-15 cents, CEO Matt Turner $19,000 at 13 cents.)

The only other time in my career that I’ve seen such low-hanging fruit was in 2008 when we were buying ATAC shares at 10 cents and the stock went to 10 bucks. Rockhaven now has an immediacy that ATAC doesn’t. And there is huge exploration potential that gets no credit. It’s not hard to see Klaza reaching 3-4-5 million ounces if you go up-dip and down-dip from deep, really good hits. I think there’s at least 5 million ounces there.

Come on guys, the writing is on the wall. We effectively told you we have a mine here. At the Western BRX we’ve got a pit with a quarter million ounces at above 9 grams per tonne. Do the math. What the hell is the matter here?

Q: Well, why aren’t majors capitalizing more on low valuations in this sector?

The majors have a habit of overpaying at the top of the market. They are running so fast that their tongues are hanging out, trying to keep up production levels. The majors are high-grading their deposits and not replacing the reserves.

On some of the recent major investments into juniors, they are predatory and smart, quite frankly. But most are not even thinking about new acquisitions, despite the fact they’re depleting their reserves. As a rule, mining companies are run by bean counters and engineers. Mining engineers are the least imaginative people I’ve ever met when it comes to deal making.

If I’m a major or mid-tier mining company, and looking for an economic deposit, I would look for an established resource that has lots of blue sky. Klaza fits the bill.

Q: What approach is Strategic Metals taking in tough market conditions?

We are keeping our powder dry and doing smart deals. It’s a bit of a holding pattern but sometimes the best deal is the one you don’t do. Timing is key.

Disclosure: James Kwantes owns shares of Rockhaven Resources, ATAC Resources and Strategic Metals. Strategic Metals is one of three Resource Opportunities sponsor companies. This article is for informational purposes only and may contain forward-looking statements. All investors need to do their own due diligence.