Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
18:38 But the truth of it is, there's no real king. Neither high grades nor tonnage on their own prove profitability by themselves. And although grade and size are the most critical variables in the mining business, they only tell part of the story. Of course, all Allison's be equal higher grades are her king, but you really got to be comparing that to 1 specific project. Once you start branching out and comparing that to multiple projects, multiple jurisdictions, it may not be so important. And there's a whole bunch of other criteria. Obviously, you have grade, you have tonnage, you have geology, you have geometry, geography, politics, they all come into play. And Let's look at 2 occurrences in Northern Ontario. You have the chromatite deposit in the Ring of Fire, which is some of the highest-grade metallurgical chromite in the world. One of the largest resources of metallurgical chromite in the world, and it's still on the ground.
19:30 Right next to it, you have a relatively small but very high-grade Nickel deposits. It's also in the ground. So, yeah, grade and tonnage is only one of a variety of factors that's ultimately going to influence the profitability and that's going to be the deposit that dictates that. But in early stage projects, obviously grade is somewhat more important just because you don't always have those numbers to start talking about tonnages. That makes sense. Brian, I'll shoot it to you for your perspective on grade versus scale. Yeah, I mean, it's jurisdictional driven to me. So, certain areas and camps, grade will allow you more flexibility on how you choose to develop an ore body. And if you took Timmins for an example, there's ore moving up to 180 kilometers to 6 different mills.
20:24 And so as you move up this grade chain, you have a lot more flexibility in terms of what you can do with that. So to me, it becomes most relevant when you start thinking about the capital cost trade-off around development and dollars per ounce of annual production and items like this where your grade, smaller piece of infrastructure still high productivity may offer the highest margin. There's lots of examples where you have a Cote out there which is 0.9 grams and 20 plus million ounces where it's the opposite. But grade is king. Grade is helpful. Grade allows flexibility in terms of how you choose to process it or where you choose to process it.
21:13 To me, it's always a consideration but it's really only at that more advanced stage where you start seeing it drive a path a little more in terms of the grade tonnage trade-off. But yeah, I would always take grade if given the choice. Yeah, Fair enough. Scott, I'll throw it to you for that same question. Yeah. I don't know how much I have to add, except just kind of emphasizing the margins and the economics. And I think, you know, gold's not unique in that, in the grade is important. I think it could be any commodity. And, and yeah, you know, higher grade tends to lead to higher margins. Obviously, if everything else is the same, you're moving the same amount of rock to get more product for it. And so that's better. When you do get into larger tonnages, it can potentially open up different processing techniques or options, you know, thinking of like a high-grade veins that generally aren't, you know, you're not seeing it in 3 dimensions, just a big continuous thing for hundreds of metres.
22:15 Like, you know, I'm talking multi-ounce per ton sort of deposits that you're, or even just many grams per ton that you're mining underground versus you get big, low-grade bulk tonnage things that then, okay, there's a cheaper mining option available to you. But at the end of the day, that's still just how do your margins stack up against, well, essentially your CapEx. And yeah, so what makes the most sense going forward? For sure. Appreciate that. I got one question. Scott, I can actually start with you here, too. Let's often see, and I think increasingly, companies report high-grade gold results over extended intervals. How far do you think this smearing, people call it, of grades go before it becomes misleading? And is there a marketing angle, you think, to these reporting practices?
23:07 I would say the marketing angle is probably that you just wanna show more continuity. You know, as Brian talked about, continuity is important in geological systems and grade smearing could come down to, okay, you've intersected that 10cm vein and it's got thousands of grams per tonne and you want to make it look a little bit more beefy. I think that in terms of where the line is between misleading and not misleading, I think that you just have to be transparent. You've got to break it down. You've got to show how those intervals hang together. And I can see from the reporting standpoint of, you have a mineralised zone and yes, there are kind of lower grade and higher grade parts of it. And you want to show, look, we found this big zone and this is what it averages. But at the same time, you know, I think where it crosses the line into misleading is if you're sweeping a lot of sub-economic mineralization under the rug, like if you say you hit 10m of something, but 9 of those 10m are 0.2g per ton, that's anomalous mineralization.
24:16 In a certain context, that might be minable mineralization, but in most, it's probably not. And then if you just have that 1 meter carrying everything and you're not disclosing that, if you're not upfront about it, that would be quite misleading. And ultimately, probably inappropriate just to smear it over that non-economic stuff anyway. Great. Brian, I'll shoot that question to you as well, actually. To me, it's all about cutoff. So if you are an open pit scenario, you should be reporting things at a 0.2, 0.3. And if you have higher grade intervals that need a 3 gram, a 5 gram, or 10 gram is subinterval, you, you need to show those. And, you might have an interval that's at a 0.3 cutoff showing 10 meter widths. And, and I think it's appropriate to quote that cut off and show the included and anybody that's reading that will very quickly pick up that okay, you might have 90% of it in that sub interval and you might have 10% of it in a broader interval. They'll see that, they'll understand it, what it is.
25:21 So I think it's just disclosure. We personally will always show things at a 0.2, 0.3, if it's in an open pit environment, and we'll show the high grade subinterval, and we show both transparently, and talk towards it, And I think pictures help too. Oh, great. There's one question in the chat. Like I'll throw it to all of you. If anybody has an answer or wants to speak on it, please do feel free. It's an interesting question, I think, but it's really about financial strategy. So Kay from the chat asks, how did companies approach financing when visible gold is detected but before assays are complete, in that period when the market's excited? Just what do you think is the best strategy in such a scenario? I'll throw it to Anybody who's got an instinct on it? Yeah, we wouldn't do that. Yeah, we wouldn't do that.
26:07 I just think you leave yourself very open to disappointing investors one way or the other. And I do think it's material. So If you've got a visible piece of core and you don't have an assay for it, how can you finance without disclosing a piece of material information? So I personally, we wouldn't do it. I just echo that. I mean, You're just opening yourself up to all sorts of problems if you base the financing on visible Gold or any other visual mineralization. Just wait for the assays and play it safe. Maybe when you're drilling holes where visible Gold is a dime a dozen, it's a different scenario, but when it's fairly unique, just wait for the assays.
27:03 I would tend to agree, except that I have to basically speak from the exact opposite experience where we did drill our hole 7 on Valley where we had really dime a dozen, hundreds of instances of this old widespread mineralization. That was something that, okay, well, this is material. Like we have to put this out. And that was back in 2022, lag times on assays were months. We couldn't just continue to drill this thing and not disclose to the market that we've gotten into it, with the usual caveats that we don't know what the grades are, that kind of thing. Although we had some comparables in terms of the holes we drilled the previous summer. We'd seen the same style mineralization, smaller intervals, less BGE, but even those holes were good, still 100m plus gram per tonne plus.
28:01 We put that out there and we had people beating down our doors, a very fortunate situation, obviously, but trying to, you know, give us money at big premiums with no warrants attached. And so it's like, well, you know, okay, these people are, these groups are, you know, investors, they understand what they're getting into, they understand what we're into here. So, yeah, I mean, it's, that's a pretty unusual situation. For the most part, you know, we weren't really just kind of flying the flag saying, look at this, look at this, trying to get money under the hood while we could and leaving people in lurch. And we had mixed feelings about it too. We actually cut the size of the investment, what was on the table, we didn't take all of it. And I think ultimately, for some of the reasons there, but also because we saw the upside too, and we said, well, hold on, I think it probably works to everyone's advantage to wait and see the assays. You reduce the investor risk, but reduce the company risk to take a whole bunch of money and then finding out that it's much better than we thought. And so I think we found a middle ground there that works.
29:13 But I agree completely with what Brian and Kiener are saying as well. That was a pretty unique scenario. Yeah, it's unusual. Those unusual ones always pop up. But speaking of Tom in the chat, speaking of unusual scenarios, asks if anyone on the panels ever had an early stage project with visual gold in samples that weren't supported in the final assays? Just as a counter example of something unusual there as well. Anybody, if you have an example, please go for it. I just think it happens, right? It happens all the time. If you have a grain or 2 and you're not a sulfide associated, there's no fine gold in it. Very easy to get a sample of 2 or 3 grains of good looking visible gold and get a half gram out of it regularly.
30:02 So Ian, Scott, do you guys agree? You think it's fairly common? Yeah. We've seen it too, where fine-grained gold, a few scattered greens, It comes back much lower than anticipated, for sure. Great. Yeah, exactly. And even, yeah, we've seen visible Gold on a lot of different targets now that haven't necessarily gotten, Even on Valley, there are intervals with visible Gold that return half gram, as Brian was saying, a sub-gram. It really isn't the BL on end-all and the assays really matter. One thing I would add though, that it's interesting as technology kind of advances here, so we've had examples where we had maybe a 2 gram visible gold-bearing sample and we're like, well, we wanted to understand the context more of it. So the photon assaying and using other pinpoint assaying methods to understand where the gold is in a given sample and if there is more gold than just that one visible piece really gives you context.
31:13 In instances where maybe that's happened, there's other technology now to help you understand what the opportunity is or just more about that system. So I think that's an interesting one where just a lot more information can be garnered with what's out there these days. Great. Tom in the chat says that makes him feel a lot better. So appreciate everybody's answer there. One question I've got is beyond obvious, you know, visual appeal and all the marketing stuff we've talked about so far, How does finding visible goal influence your exploration strategy from there? So what changes do you make, if any, to your existing exploration strategy when you find it? Throw it to Ian, actually, if you've got an answer. Yeah, well, just recently we've had reports that are 2 different, you know, the visible goal has 2 different influences on our exploration strategy. One was driving it, 1 was confirming it. So, the significance of VG often depends on where you are in the history of your exploration program.
32:16 I mean, The first time we found visible Gold at Root & Sellar was actually in boulders, but we placed quite a bit of significance on it and it pivoted our exploration because we began to think that that area where we found the VG and these boulders was on the periphery of the mineralised system based on some of the recent drilling. But when we found that it wasn't just 1 boulder, I think it was probably about a dozen different boulders with VG, we knew based on the geology and ice direction that we were within tens of metres of the source. And so we were about to sort of write that area off as an area of high potential, but clearly those boulders redirected us and said, no, we need to go back and have a look at that area. And since then, we're starting to find the structures that that Visbo Gold probably came from. So that actually totally redirected our exploration.
33:05 More recently, we've had a case where both drilling and sampling showed us a bunch of textures that showed we were in the centre zone of one of these epithermal systems. So You're basically above the boiling zone. The boiling zone is where you expect to see your gold, but we're right at the very top. And we had a lot of textures that were telling us a lot of chemistry that telling us we're at the top of one of these vein systems, which is exciting. So we had all of the evidence of that, but then we actually started to find VG. And that just sort of reinforced our interpretation that we were in the right area rather than sort of pivoting it. It came at the end and reinforced our current interpretation that that was the area we should be focusing on. So, to the end members of using visible Gold as part of your exploration strategy.
33:54 I appreciate that. Scott, I don't know if you've got a perspective on how you shift or pivot when you find visible Gold? Yes, I think that's a really good point that VG itself can be almost an indicator mineral. That's obviously what you're looking for if you're looking for Gold, but at the same time it can help you position yourself within a system. And you can have just at the very early stage, just some obvious indicators for fertility, for decent metallurgy, assuming that a bulk of your mineralization is held as visible Gold or similar. And We've been fortunate in using Visible Gold as just one of several tools in terms of, again, this is very specific to the deposit type, but where you have just thousands of these little veins.
34:49 And not most of the, there are a bunch of different vein generations. Most of them are mineralized, not all of them are. And so you kind of have to look at how many of these veins are there, you know, to tell if you're in good grade. But then even within the veins, we've hit some high vein density zones that didn't have much Gold content in them. And so you're actually looking in the veins like, okay, well, is there actually Gold in them? So in some ways, we're almost exploring this gold system like a basement deposit where you get their core back and you just have a good look at it and you can start to get a handle on the overall grade, very qualitatively, but still enough to guide your future exploration before you're waiting for those assay results to come back. So visible gold has been an extremely useful tool in that respect.
35:38 Appreciate it very much. Brian, I think it's on to you for this question. Yeah, to me, it's the presence or the character of the visible Gold as it relates to the system. So what I'm most interested in finding is visible Gold or any Gold that ties to a system that has continuity and that has scale. So if we're out under an area where we know there's no exploration been completed, but we're finding Gold in the till and we're finding Gold in sonic holes. And we can see that and it's tied to this shear zone that is this orientation. And we can look in that in detail and say, look, there's a regional scale structure. That structure now we know has this current signature, whether it's geophysical or geochemical or pathfinders.
36:25 And we understand it now to be fertile. Immediately that target will move up to the top of our pyramid and something like Muskego, which is a target of ours and in Timmons would have sat down our pipeline further for the last couple of years. And with a couple extra pieces of data, all of a sudden that target is now moved up to be we got to drill it and we got to drill it as soon as we can. And so that presence of visible Gold, and there's lots of other data that we use to incorporate it, just really cemented and reassessed the fertility of that area. And so a single occurrence or a single piece of data information can just bring your eyes back to a target and lots of good examples. But for me, it's all just about trying to say, what's it telling us about the system?
37:17 I appreciate that. I do have a question for each of you individually, but please do also take this opportunity to promote your project, talk about your project. Brian, I will start with you. GFG has been involved in various exploration projects that target high potential Gold deposits. Can you share the discovery of visible Gold has impacted your specific exploration strategy at GFG and what specific steps your team takes to assess the quality and potential of an ore body once that gold is found? Yeah, no, I think I could probably flag highs and lows. And we've had some targets that had really strong primary drill results, visible gold at surface, and we actually managed to get exceptionally good drill results on our first pass.
38:03 But we went to follow it up on 10, 20, 30 meter spacings, 50 meter spacings, and we couldn't trace it. It was an extremely high nugget effect system where visible gold didn't have continuity, and it resulted in killing a target that looked very promising off the start. The flip side of this is looking at something like Askego where we've built a fairly thorough understanding of what the gold is telling us. And so if it is tied to sulfide, is it just presence of visible gold? When we do the photon assaying of this piece of rock, we can see there's gold distributed throughout the entirety of the rock. The visible gold in many instances is probably a remold of just fine gold.
38:50 In quite a few cases you find coarse Gold that reflects the presence of finer Gold. I'm out in Timmins, we've got a great example at Muskego where visible Gold yet hasn't been seen in a diamond drill hole. It was only in a sonic hole that we're being used to sample till for. We happened to get a piece of rock at the bottom of that sonic till hole and it had visible Gold. Lo and behold, it was in a shear zone and it was tied to a bunch of pathfinders and it fits on one of our main structural corridors. So, as exciting for us is we have 2 main target areas in Timmins. We've published a lot of really great drill results with some really strong visible Gold at an old mine called Eljo. We're drilling into that and we've had some exceptionally good results and we're pending assays on that. That's a really fascinating system where we have Gold and drill core underneath an old mine and it's moving towards an advanced target that you can see creating a resource on down the line with further drilling.
39:49 And then we have visible Gold, that is truly the first piece of rock we've seen in this swamp. And that is incredibly exciting. I think it's a good end member application with what we're doing, where you see it at a resource stage or near resource stage, and you're seeing it really early in the exploration cycle. And both of those things are telling us really exciting things about the systems that we have in Timmins. Awesome, appreciate that. I guess I'll shoot it to Scott. So in your opinion, has Snowline moved beyond the initial discovery phase? And if so, what's your strategy to maintain investor interest during the classically challenging kind of orphan period of the Lassonde curve? Well, I mean, we're still exploring a value.
40:36 We have an initial resource out, but we're still, you know, it has big open edges to that system. So we're still building on that scale. So, you know, we're still by definition in the exploration stage and trying to see what we have out there. And ultimately, you know, I don't think that maybe this is one of the advantages of exploring in a bear market or making a discovery in a bear market is that, you know, we never really had a euphoric run up either. I feel like there's always been sort of skepticism or too fresh of wounds or so on, even in folks who are very supportive and excited about the project. I feel like we've never really gotten to that euphoric peak. So maybe we expand things further and we get there and then we have an orphan period to deal with.
41:24 But no, we've had a slow and steady climb, which I think is fairly unusual. And that's reflected in, we had just piecemeal little land positions out in our area when we made our valley discovery and there was almost no other staking there. We just incrementally built and built and built to the point where we have 3,600 square kilometres there. We basically staked everything that's of interest to us and just consolidated that land position. Whereas, you know, had we made that discovery in 2010 or 2011, we would have had 30 companies in there literally within a month going at it. So, you know, it's certainly a different environment that we're exploring in now. And the other part of that, in thinking about that Lausanne curve, because that is a real phenomenon, it affects different companies differently and it's just a model, so it's never going to perfectly reflect reality. But nonetheless, part of that is that district scale that we now have and the targets that we have within it.
42:25 It's always been our intention to test whether there is a district out there. That was why we launched the company. That's why we started exploring where we started exploring and finding something like our Valley deposit right out of the gate is an extremely strong proof of concept that, okay, it wasn't this target looks great, let's start a company around it. It was this district looks great, let's start a company and find something like Valley just really emphasizes that. We're still finding new targets out there. We're seeing lots of really exciting geology out there and samples out there on these other targets. We're certainly hoping that we can make another discovery. We think it's pretty unlikely that Valley is sitting out there all on its lonesome in this very fertile looking area with big anomalies all over the place. And so if we can get into another discovery curve at the point where we do start to exhaust the first curve and kind of just stack those up, that would be obviously an ideal scenario and just keep the excitement going through to production on that first discovery.
43:28 Awesome, thanks, Scott. And Ian, I know there's more visible Gold discovered in August for you guys. What's next for investors at Root & Cellar and Northern Shield more broadly? Well, we've just completed a high-resolution magnetic survey, ladder survey over the central piece of the property where we're finding all these centres. We have done obviously an airborne survey in the past, but once we began to realise the structural orientations of these vein systems at depth, we wanted to rerun that survey. That survey has been completed. We're just waiting for the processing of that data. And that's really the final step before sort of fine-tuning a drill program being planned for this fall.
44:17 But as we're advancing our flagship root and seltzer property in the Bermondsey of Newfoundland, it's being explored for Gold, Silver and Tellurium with strong indications of Copper porphyry, which are often related. They are end members of these epithermal systems. We certainly have high-grade of all those components. I mean, we have Gold up to 111g per tonne, Silver up to 1,400, Tellurium up to 700ppm, which is extremely high, and Copper, these are grab samples, but up to 10%. And so the grades are certainly there, but equally important, we started to find a very large footprint of low-grade mineralization. And this is just what we really try to get across to our shareholders in our recent presentation. This is not, we're not in the main system. This is all stuff that's leaking up from debt through these structures.
45:08 It paints a picture that there's more minimization at debt. So, we certainly have indications of high-grade around and defining a very large footprint. And it's one of the benefits of exploring for low-sulfidation Gold systems. They are often associated with bonanza grades of Gold and Silver for that matter. Typically, relatively small tonnages, but the grades are often so high that the ounces can come through at the end of the day. But a select few of these low-sulfidation deposits are also associated with very large tonnages. And when you look at examples from around the world, these unusual large tonnage, high-grade, low-sulfidation systems, they typically have 1 of 2 associations and that is either they are associated with alkaline intrusions, so alkaline-related systems, such as Porbera, Purple Creek, or they are in shadows of Copper-Porphyrese or perhaps in aborted Copper-Porphyrese systems like Bruce Jacket, sort of fluctuated between the epithermal and the mesothermal system.
46:10 And so we see both those associations at root and so we certainly have alkalic or sub-alkalic volcanism. The tellurium is an indication of that too. And we clearly have indications of a Copper-Porphy or perhaps a border of Copper-Porphy, but we're in that shadow of the Copper-Porphy system. And so we have those criteria and a lot of other data over the summer as continually points in the same direction. So we have all these associations, a very robust exploration model and of course, the visible goal. And that's why we're so excited about the next phase of drilling in root and cellar. And even little, relatively little things, we have an MSc student from Memorial University on the project, which is mostly to do with just the mapping and some of the alteration and the timing of these events. But he came up with some plots the other day using quite an innovative use of assay data and some whole rock geochemistry as a proxy for the alteration minerals. And it just highlighted this main area that we call the discovery area again, which we already interpreted as being one of the upflow zones. And his work, you know, very, very strongly supported that. So that sort of came out of the blue as a as a as an add on.
47:29 But it's all the different data sets keeps on pointing in the same direction. And that gives us a lot of confidence going into this drill program this fall. Awesome. Well, Ian, Brian, Scott, thanks so much for this conversation. I think it was a good chat. Hope investors in the audience learned quite a bit. There are a couple of questions we couldn't get to today. They're just specific to individual companies. We'll make sure the relevant companies get them and then get answers as soon as possible. I'd like to thank everybody for joining us today and for engaging in the chat. Really appreciated. You should get the replay this afternoon. But Gentlemen, thank you so much.
